(image courtesy of bjkeefe)

The right is collectively imploding over Sarah Palin's resignation, and as with any sort of passing there comes a period of grieving. Two major stages in that process are denial and anger, and the always-classy Erick Erickson of RedState is already showing signs of both:

1. Sarah Palin resigned, I think, to spare her family from more attacks. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Sarah Palin is doing this just days after a very nasty Vanity Fair article where folks like Nicolle Wallace and, according to Bill Kristol, McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt (though I’m told Schmidt is not involved), savaged her.

2. Unfortunately, by resigning, I think the left and national media will be emboldened to ritualistically engage in the metaphorical gang raping of conservative politicians, particularly those who are female and have children. They’ll decide savaging Palin’s family drove her from office, so the sky’s the limit on the next conservative with kids.

Finally, Erickson goes flat out delusional, comparing Palin's resignation to Obi Wan Kenobi taking one for the team and sacrificing it all to fight the dark side:

4. I’ve had this running thought all day, perhaps because I was watching it on TV in HD for the first time, that this is kind of like Ben Kenobi letting Darth Vader strike him down. Palin is not going to run in 2012, but by doing this she can now become Barack Obama’s worst nightmare, and help rebuild the opposition to Obama. How? Because were she to remain a 2012 contender, she’d keep having stories by anonymous McCain campaign staffers and other 2012 contenders going after her and her family. Take that ambition off the table and it neutralizes a lot of that. So she can focus on candidates and ideas without an ulterior motive focused on 2012.
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Really? Erick, you know this wasn't about her children. She used them as political props all through the '08 campaign and continued to do it till the bitter end. And in the end, it was her ineptitude and ethical shortcomings that did her in. Perhaps the enduring lesson from this tragic political tale with be that going forward, politicians of all stripes should think twice about exploiting their children for political gain.

Is there an indictment coming for Palin? That remains to be seen, but one thing seems certain -- Sarah Palin is now toxic. She walked away from the people of her state when the going got tough and has shed any remaining crumbs of credibility she may have had left.

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Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum joined Chuck Todd, filling in for Chris Matthews on Hardball, to discuss his recent article on Sarah Palin.

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Both Mark McKinnon and Nicolle Wallace, recently the McCain-Palin campaign's media gurus, were both on MSNBC this morning to talk ostensibly about serious subjects but eventually came around to the matter of Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin, in which they both figure prominently as objects of the diva's ire.

Both do their best to speak glowingly of Palin -- McKinnon says he actually only coached her for two hours -- and Wallaces talks up Palin's future prospects. But really, one only need read the piece to see the writing that's been on the wall for some time for Palin: She is road kill in the rear-view mirror of the Republican Party's Beltway movers and shakers.

It also raises some salient larger points:

Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

The issue, it seems, comes down to the initial lack of vetting:

There is virtually nothing about Palin’s performance in the fall campaign that should have come as a surprise to John McCain. Had he really attempted to learn something about her before the fateful day of August 29, 2008, when he announced that she was his choice for running mate, he would easily have discerned all the traits that he belatedly came to know.

Palin's career as a mainstream Republican is probably at a dead end, because her name is now synonymous with Wacky Loser. However, that doesn't mean her career is dead, by any means. There's a big bunch of Teabaggers out there primed and ready to party with a charismatic leader, and Evita Palin fits the bill.

I have nothing against Christina Aguilera, but if you had taken me aside at the Bikini Kill show at The Bank (NYC) in 1995 (I think) and told me that 14 years later the singer would be collaborating with the woman who would become the next Mariah Carey, I would've laughed you out of the dank, smelly bathroom and/or the pit. So, pretend antagonist, feel free to say "I told you so."

Christina Aguilera sure has come a long way from her "Genie in a Bottle" days. For her upcoming September album, Light & Darkness, she recorded songs with British electronic acts Goldfrapp and Ladytron, plus former Zero 7 singer Sia, as SPIN.com reported last summer.

Now, Perez Hilton says that über-feminist punk group Le Tigre (which features Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna -MB) will join "Xtina" in the studio to work on the album.

The invisible wall between Maximum Rock'N'Roll and Vanity Fair collapsed long ago, but the dust still causes the occasional cough.

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Vanity Fair:

We had our own presidential campaign cover in the works, which explored a different facet of the Politics of Fear, but we shelved it when The New Yorker’s became the “It Girl” of the blogosphere. Now, however, in a selfless act of solidarity with our downstairs neighbors here at the Condé Nast building, we’d like to share it with you. Confidentially, of course.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer political cartoonist David Horsey put together his own parody, as has blogger Jeremy Glass.

  In order to determine whether or not "water boarding" is indeed torture, Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens decided to do the most logical thing: experience it first hand.

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“If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

Vanity Fair:

Arms already lost to me, I wasn’t able to flail as I was pushed onto a sloping board and positioned with my head lower than my heart. (That’s the main point: the angle can be slight or steep.) Then my legs were lashed together so that the board and I were one single and trussed unit. Not to bore you with my phobias, but if I don’t have at least two pillows I wake up with acid reflux and mild sleep apnea, so even a merely supine position makes me uneasy. And, to tell you something I had been keeping from myself as well as from my new experimental friends, I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me. Not that that makes me special: I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of drowning. As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element. In brief, when it comes to breathing, give me good old air every time.

The entire terrifying account is truly worth the read. It's also important to remember, as Hitchens explains, that his experience would end the moment he wanted it to and that he would be returned afterwards to his rather privileged life; not some dark cell for an indefinite period of time under the harshest of conditions. Whether or not one thinks the United States should be using this "technique" is (I guess?) open for debate. What's not, however, is the fact that it is torture. Can we all agree on that already, please?

And in case you needed anything more to feel outraged/ashamed about today, check out this story from The New York Times about where the Gitmo "interrogtation techniques" originated from:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

As John Cole wonders, "Can the indictments start now?"