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(Lest we all forget - only thirty-five years ago)

Hard to imagine it was only thirty-five years ago that President Nixon announced his resignation. It certainly answered weeks of speculation and the end to a long and bitter fight that erupted in the White House and almost took the country down with it.

Nixon: "I have never been a quitter - to leave office now is abhorrent to everything in my body. But . . . . "

I'm not sure we actually ever recovered from Watergate and the Nixon years. To many, it seems to be the gift that just keeps on giving.

History is just like that.

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Bill O'Reilly, last night on his Fox News show, discussing Sarah Palin:

O'Reilly: The perception that the governor is dumb comes almost exclusively from the left, does it not?

Well, no doubt there are a lot of people on the left who consider Sarah Palin dumb. But they're hardly alone.

Peggy Noonan:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

Kathleen Parker:

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

... If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

Parker again:

Of course, there’s a difference between a lack of polish and a lack of coherence. Some of Palin’s interview responses can’t even be critiqued on their merits because they’re so nonsensical. “Let Sarah be Sarah” has become the latest rallying cry among my colleagues on the right. She’ll be fine if we just leave her alone, they say. Between prayers, I might add.

David Frum:

I think Sarah Palin was a huge mistake...Americans can be pretty jokey about their government when times are good, but when times are bad, they want to know do -- can you do the job? And when you have a candidate who so obviously has never thought about any of the issues that are going to be important to the next administration and whose knowledge is so shallow, it makes people -- it doesn't just make people offended, it makes them afraid.

David Brooks:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

You don't have to be a liberal to conclude that Sarah Palin is not what they call "the sharpest tool in the shed" back in Alaska. You just have to be someone not consuming the Republican Clap Louder Kool Aid.

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The straight talking Jesse Ventura hits the nail directly on the head with the problem Sarah Palin's going to have if she aspires to run for higher office.

KING: All right. Let's move to Governor Palin, the former governor, soon to be former Governor Palin. What do you make of her resigning?

VENTURA: She's a quitter. Let me put it to you this way, Larry; by not being sexist, She could never make it as a Frog Man or Navy SEAL. Because if you utter the words in BUDS training, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training, I quit, you're gone.

I don't remember one person in my class that quit. I remember every person I graduated with. It offends me over the fact that she told the people of Alaska she wanted to be their governor. And she wanted -- and that's a four-year commitment. And now, right in the middle, she quits?

Well, if she's got plans of running for higher office, I would never vote for her, because if it gets too hot in the kitchen, she is liable to quit.

KING: Do you think there's an underlying reason maybe we don't know?

VENTURA: Well, I don't think she was put under anymore scrutiny with the media than I was as an independent. My children were attacked in Minnesota. Everything I did was put under the microscope.

But the point is, Larry, you don't quit. When you make an obligation and you take an oath, doesn't it mean anything anymore?

Apparently not Jesse. CNN left off King's grunt he got in response in their transcript...lol.

The Urban Dictionary has just added a new phrase:

Pullin' a Palin

1. Quitting when the going gets tough; abandoning the responsibility entrusted to you by your neighbors for book advances and to make money on the lecture circuit.

2. Bizarre move that will damn ambitions for higher office.

I bet when people saw Jade they were convinced that David Caruso was pullin' a Palin.

Please feel free to use this new term in a sentence in the open thread below...

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Rachel Maddow has a bit of fun with Sarah Palin for her "I quit clarification tour" in waders. Sarah Palin felt the need to do interviews with NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News and the Anchorage Daily News to attempt to clarify her press conference given over the weekend. As Rachel notes, the only real difference between what she said in her rambling press conference over the holiday weekend and these interviews was not substance, but style...lol. And Rachel's right. It was "folksy at the stun level".

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From CNN's Political ticker-- Palin says she is not a quitter:

Sarah Palin's not a quitter, she wants the public to know.

"I am not a quitter. I am a fighter," Palin told CNN on Monday while on a family fishing trip, on the heels of her Friday bombshell announcement that she was resigning as Alaska's governor.

Palin did her interview standing on the shores of Dillingham, Alaska, wearing hip waders. She granted 10-minute interviews to CNN and three other news networks Monday.

She resigned because of the tremendous pressure, time and financial burden of a litany of ethics complaints in the past several months, she said. The complaints were without merit and took away from the job she wanted to do for Alaskans, Palin said.

The decision to resign a year and a half before her term ends, and her rambling, often-disjointed resignation speech Friday, fueled days of debate among political analysts.

Speculation has run rampant that Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008, will seek the presidency in 2012.

When pressed about her future, Palin would say only that she would work in public service. She did not rule out a run for the White House or any other political office.

Palin is to leave the governor's office in late July.

The days since her resignation had been exhilarating and she loved being in Dillingham, a town of only a few thousand people and no cell phone service, Palin said.

On Monday, her personal lawyer also spoke about her resignation.

No legal "bombshell" or personal scandal lies behind Palin's resignation, but off-color jokes by talk-show host David Letterman contributed to her decision to step down, Thomas Van Flein said.

The governor needed a break after being "on duty now for two and a half years solid," he said.

"There is no bombshell. There is no shoe to drop. There are no investigations of any type that I'm aware of — no IRS audit, no federal investigation, no state investigation," Van Flein told CNN. "There is no legal reason in terms of a legal problem that compelled the governor to resign."

Friday was "deliberately chosen" for the announcement because of its proximity to the July Fourth holiday, Van Flein said: "She declared her independence from politics as usual."

Palin reiterated that statement in her interview.

Heather: Whatever you say Sarah. Good luck with that Presidential run if you decide to jump in there in 2012. Repeating something over and over doesn't make it true.