I will never vote for Mitt Romney again (and I did vote for him in the primaries); nor will I vote for Huckabee. I will vote for Palin or Jim DeMint if he happens to run. All the rest of the Republican establishment can go straight to hell.

Well, it’s hard not to feel likewise about the Republican establishment. But it’s hard for me to get worked up over a Sarah Palin candidacy. I like her, but I fear she has been too damaged by the media and her own performance during the campaign to recover, even with the election more than three years off.

Alaska should be safe, now, with Sarah Palin resigning.

But what the heck are we supposed to make of this? This may be a “new beginning” for her, but only in a personal sense. It’s hard to see her as a serious presidential contender in 2012. She’ll now be painted as a quitter in addition to  whatever other charges are leveled against her. And to the extent she was hounded from office by frivolous ethics complaints and the expense of fighting them, claiming to be worried about taxpayer money being wasted on those investigations is overshadowed by caving in to those tactics and can only encourage their more widespread use.

I’m afraid Ace and Allahpundit are right — her presidential chances are dead — and Smitty is dreaming. It’s a nice dream, but a dream nonetheless. Sarah’s finished. Though I’d love to be proven wrong.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey captures my thoughts:

I liked Sarah Palin and supported her inclusion on the GOP ticket last fall.  I thought she had more toughness than this.  It’s a big disappointment, and it’s the end of any hope of Palin getting taken seriously as a politician on the national level in the future.

UPDATE #2: With a link to Sister Toldjah, The Anchoress reminds us to maintain some perspective:

Sister Toldjah: has links to important stories you’re missing, while you’re either crying about Palin or laughing about her. Good point. Since we know nothing, it might be good to think about why Obama is against new sanctions against Iran, but strongly supporting them for Honduras.

UPDATE #3: American Power chronicles lefty reactions.

UPDATE #4: Hell, maybe OCBill, commenting at The Anchoress, has it right:

Career is not over unless she wants it to be. The “career over” people already didn’t like her. People who like her, mostly because of her ideas, will back her when ever she wants to come back into public life. Unless it turns out that she has a soulmate in Argentina.

With several blogs devoted to Palin, she really doesn’t need me to stick up for her. But two recent articles at The American Thinker caught my eye for their analyses of two classes of Palin detractors.

First up is writer/singer Lloyd Marcus, who starts by comparing Sarah Palin to Gary Cooper in High Noon, and then writes:

Why are Obama and his gang so committed and desperate to destroy Palin? Could it be they recognize her destiny, like that of Moses, to set her people free? And why is she so despised by them? Obama’s gang hate Palin for all the reasons we love her. Sheriff Palin is a good, decent and strong character driven conservative leader. Palin also believes in God. Such humility and virtues are as repulsive to liberals as showing Dracula the cross.

Something that sticks in the craw of many liberal women is that in their youth, they brought into the feminist rhetoric that women’s liberation means no husband and family. Tragically, they find themselves aging and alone. Meanwhile, this conservative woman has it all: great career, fine family and a husband who loves and respects her. Adding insult in injury, Sheriff Palin looks mighty fine in her jeans.

She is seen as a threat and she’s not allowed to be happy because she’s not a feminist. OK, that’s about right. Stuart Schwartz explores that feminist angle in depth, specifically in contrast to the cultural movement surrounding Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues:

The Washington Post, which has devoted much of the past decade celebrating the Ensler culture, nastily declared that her “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”  Those were among the kinder words written by one of its showcased writers on faith, a University of Chicago divinity school professor who also derisively noted that someone who “has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!)” does not a woman make.

So what does make a woman…politically, that is? Hate and cultural conformity, to judge by the venom spilling from the nation’s elite.  Ensler promotes this, exhorting women to “vote with your vaginas” and put Democrats in office. She has urged them “to get our vaginas to the polls”, in this last election warning that a vote for Palin is the equivalent of a vote for rape…the bad kind. Women — and those non-traditional men who have escaped gender stereotypes to embrace a walk down the “vagina trail” — should ask themselves: what would your vagina do?

Conservatives knew all this already, but I’m hoping that this kind of thing is being noticed beyond the grassroots.

But a woman scorned is one thing. A woman scorned and handy with a firearm is another.

Barack Obama isn’t merely destroying his own unearned reputation for smarts; he’s adding to Sarah Palin’s day by day. The public is beginning to wonder if Obama really was as prepared and brilliant as he press swore; and if they’re wondering about that, they must also be wondering about other claims the press swore to, such as the lack of preparation and weakness of mind of Sarah Palin.

Or, as he put it in the title of his post:

Wow, We Really Dodged a Bullet with Sarah Palin, Huh?

Governor Palin, since you were selected as a vice presidential candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has given more press conferences to American reporters than you have. Why do you have less confidence in the American press and people than the president of Iran does? And when will you dare to face the press for real?>

None of what I’m about to say excuses Palin from facing the press, but it’s undeniably true, and is implicit even in Sullivan’s question.

Here it is.

The press is far more solicitous of Ahmadinejad than of Palin, far more eager to “get” Palin than “get” Ahmadinejad, views Palin as a far more serious threat than Ahmadinejad, indeed sees Palin as far more evil than Ahmadinejad.

Sarah Palin’s credibility on foreign policy is going to take some time to gel, but the instantaneous criticism that she had no foreign policy experience was a little ridiculous. I mean, if everyone feels that strongly that a candidate has to have foreign policy experience, that pretty much limits your field doesn’t it? You’d never have had an FDR or Reagan, and the left’s criticism of Palin’s foreign policy credentials also would have disqualified Bill Clinton. They were all governors. (Ace has a good post on the “foreign policy experience” of governors generally.)

Some conservatives are getting awfully nervous about Sarah Palin. Some of the criticism is reasonable, some is not.

I think Rich Lowry of The Corner has taken a reasonable approach. I think he was right in his assessment of Palin’s performance regardng the “Bush Doctrine” question from Charlie Gibson: that “the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this.” I also agreed with him when, in a follow-up, he wrote:

The debate about how many versions of the Bush doctrine there are is serving as fog to distract attention from the fact that, on any reasonable reading, Palin didn’t know. I don’t see why we all have to be so resistant to admitting this. Let me try to demonstrate: She is totally new to these issues and has a lot of learning to do. There. Is that so hard?

Kathleen Parker calls on Palin to quit (but she bases her view of Palin’s inadequacy on her supposed inability to handle the present financial crisis, rather than foreign policy). Kat-Mo at Ace of Spades HQ does a pretty good take down of Parker’s piece. Read it all, but this should give you the gist:

Parker gets a load of the Big Financial problem in our face and decides that Palin is incapable of handling the crisis and she should leave the national politics of crashing markets to the idiot national politicians that got us here in the first place.

Brilliant idea.

Hat tip: Ace. Who, becuse his traffic is about 500,000 times mine, does not even have to include the word “Palin” in the same post as “swimsuit” to get hits, and can instead title his post, “Here’s Your God-Damned Foreign Policy Experience.”