Very well written. It belabors the obvious, and although I suppose there are some people who still need to be told, if they have the need they probably can’t be told. Also, it relies on unnamed “confidants,” although the reason for that is fairly obvious as well.

This is becoming a rather silly month news-wise, isn’t it? Everything’s either “Michael Jackson is still dead” or “Why Palin Quit.”

Anyway, on with the excerpts…

Contrary to most reports, her decision had been in the works for months, accelerating recently as it became clear that controversies and endless ethics investigations were threatening to overshadow her legislative agenda. “Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration,” someone close to the governor told me. “She was fully aware she would be branded a ‘quitter.’ She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself.”

This situation developed because Alaska’s transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin’s use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.

The question for Palin-phobes, at least those who successfully pass off the patina of being open to an opposing reasonable argument, then becomes one of: If you were the Governor of Alaska, what percentage of your time could you spend day-to-day in this defensive posture before you figured out the situation was unworkable and something had to change? If Palin’s decision says something so derogatory about her character, her resolve, her determination to fulfill a responsibility, her basic drive, then how high is that percentage, minute to minute? Fifty? Sixty? Eighty?

Some of the critics not only fail to remain open to opposing reasonable arguments, but they remain locked into the wishful thinking that pronounces SCANDAL! Most of those types are busily filling in the details. The question for them is somewhat different: What is this scandal? Are you remembering to take into account that it is now Thursday, nearly a week after the announcement, and the scandal has yet to bubble over? It has remained hidden beneath the most frothy and energized scandal-search, perhaps in this country’s history…lawyers, reporters, tabloid hacks, photographers tipping over trash cans in Juneau. They had ten weeks before the election, many months since then, and they missed whatever it is. Either the details eluded them or they didn’t give the details the same weight the Governor did. Once you fill in the nooks and crannies of that germinating theory, will it capably address all these dichotomies?