Gov. Palin Set to Start Clearing the Decks

There are folks out there (like Examiner.com's George Copeland) suggesting that Sarah Palin may have resigned from office to set up a run for the presidency in 2012, not as a Republican, but as an independent candidate. While I tend to doubt that that will be her approach, the party mandarins have every reason to worry about what she might do to them. After all, the last time Sarah Palin resigned from a position, it was the beginning of an all-out assault on the Alaska GOP, which had betrayed the party's core principles with its corruption and cronyism. Following her resignation, her political career was widely pronounced dead at the scene, but in fact it was only the beginning of the political insurgency that would carry her to the governor's mansion. The past is no guarantee of the future, but there is certainly considerable reason to think that we might see history repeating itself here.

And if so, there's good reason for it. Michelle Malkin took a well-deserved rhetorical machete to the Beltway GOP last week after the news broke of David Keene's utterly disgusting attempt to extort money from FedEx, declaring,

We’ve got major battles on the Hill and fundamental principles to defend.

Show the corrupted, Beltway-infected, power-drunk Republicans the door.

And get back to work.

I heartily agree. To this point, though, not enough Republican voters have; when I tried a while back to argue over on RedState that conservatives should back Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao (R-LA) in a primary challenge to Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), I was shouted down by a bunch of folks saying, in essence, "His voting record's good—never mind the prostitution thing." Here's hoping that sort of attitude is starting to change; it has to. My second-favorite politician, Florida's Marco Rubio, is right to say,

The Republican party should be the party that always understands that what people want more than anything else in life is for the chance to provide security for themselves and their family and to leave their kids better off than themselves.

[. . .]

For many Americans our party has become indistinguishable from the Democrats. We're viewed as the party of hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

The only way we're going to fix that, and the only way we're going to have a political party whose leaders represent and stay true to the beliefs and concerns of those who elect them, is to finish clearing the decks of the low-character power-focused Washington-corrupted lowlifes who currently make up the bulk of the national party establishment. Gov. Palin, throughout her political career, has been about cleaning folks like that out of the Republican Party, first locally and then on the state level. Now she's stepping down from her position in Alaska so she can take them on—and take them out—on the national stage. All I can say is—you go, Gov.; we're behind you every step of the way.

(Cross-posted at The Spyglass)