Lady McCheney and professional turd polisher Mary Matalin takes playing the victim card to a whole new level on Campbell Brown's show on CNN. I know when the chips are down these guys love to portray themselves or those they're shilling for as martyrs, but this is really just over the top even for Matalin.

BROWN: Sarah Palin's got some very good reasons to keep her options open right now -- 72 percent of Republicans in a recent poll said that they would consider voting for her for president in 2012.

So is quitting the new winning? Joining me to answer that, Republican strategist and CNN contributor Mary Matalin with us tonight, the "Daily Beast" editor-in-chief, Tina Brown with me as well, and NPR contributor John Ridley also here. Welcome everybody.

Mary, let me start with you, because you're a little bit out of lock step with some of your Republican friends about this decision and sort of how she handled had. Karl Rove called, said he was rather perplexed by it, Ed Rollins calling it a disaster. But you disagree.

MATALIN: Well, it was unconventional, to be sure, in the veracity and the -- velocity rather, with which the opinion class -- and I'm excluding Karl, they took it as unconventional, and they were asked to give an opinion more quickly than it needed to be digested.

What I find more interesting is it the resistance to which everybody in the chattering classes refuses to accept her at face value. She couldn't do her job anymore. Her family was under assault. She was receiving the political equivalent of a stoning. And she could not function in her job.

So the reason I thought it was smart was that she can continue to be a strong voice, build political capital out there in the next two years, and get her equilibrium reset, the word of the week, and do what she does well, which is communicate a conservative message.

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BROWN: But Mary, what does she do next? Now, if this was such a brilliant move, how does she capitalize on it.

MATALIN: It's brilliant in the sense of, if have you two bad options, you take the least bad option.

I want to speak to what Tina said. This is still an unfortunate situation that women are judged differently in politics. So it would be great if she could say, and she did say a version of, no family has been treated like this. I need to get with my family.

But if she had said it the way Tina said it, which was quite eloquent, she would have been wiped out. She would trying to do some, say it in some conventional way.

And everyone is discarding the fact that her saying she did this for Alaska, there's something false about that. She put in place a system to finish what she started there, and she literally, for the past six months, could not get work done, and it was costing lots of money.

And a small state like that, I don't know why anybody rejects it as an authentic answer. But it's sad that you couldn't say it the way Tina said it, because I think that was a huge big part of it.