An interesting take on the weekend’s big news:

This decision of Palin’s is not a do-or-die “Hollywood moment” decision, sports-analogy-wise. It’s a workmanlike, 3rd-quarter-adjustment tactical decision – and the question it should lead to is, what does Palin conceive the objective of the game to be?

We’re so used to conventional politics that the pundits, and probably many of us, assume immediately that we know the answer. Why, Palin in the Oval Office, of course! That must be the objective. What other political objective is there?

Which is why everyone is discussing her resignation in that framework: how it would affect a run for president. Has she made a smart decision that clears her calendar for a national run? Has she made a stupid decision that loads her with eccentric baggage for a national run? That about covers the aspects of the “national run” topic.

There are, of course, those who think she’s probably just tired of it all. Can’t finish the race. Couldn’t handle the pressure. All the negative press too much for her. She picked the Friday-before-a-holiday-weekend-black-hole news window to hand poor David Frum his early birthday present.

Can we step aside for a minute, and recognize how politics-as-usual these conceptual ruts are, in which all the speculation is running? I think there are a lot of smart people out there in the political punditry – people whose opinions and analysis I respect. But every analysis so far has been conventional.

Indeed it has been. We’ve been so conditioned by our greedy, grasping, corrupt permanent-politician class to think of things this way that these assumptions are now automatic. It’s one of the things that so annoyed me about all the fire-in-the-belly bushwa thrown at Fred Thompson, much of it from our own side. When it comes to seeking political office, I don’t want to see fire-in-the-belly. Clinton, Gore, Obama, and all the other megalomaniacal narcissists have plenty of that. Most of our politicians are now people who would eat a yard of shit in public if they thought it’d get them elected. And they’re just the kind of people who’ve gotten us where we are.

The real roots of our current trouble lie in the rise of the permanent political class: career politicians, who spend little or no time actually working at something productive. The idea from the beginning here was for the government to be run by citizen-legislators — free individuals who spent their life doing meaningful work, ran for office, and then took the lessons learned from the private sector into an office that they held temporarily before returning to real life. Obama, to take the most obvious and currently relevant example, has never held a real job in his life, and it’s not likely he ever will. Can anyone be surprised at his absolute cluelessness regarding how our economy is supposed to work, or that he’s hewn so closely to discredited hard-Left ideals that sound great in late-night dorm room blatherfests around the bong and beer keg, but when applied to the real world, always result in tyranny, destruction of prosperity, enslavement to the almighty State, and mass murder?

Commentators like Rick Brookhiser and Quin Hillyer will resonate with many, in advancing their opinion that Palin’s behavior just comes off as irresponsible. But I am not sure they, or many of the other established pundits, really understand how deeply disgusted millions of Americans are with the profile of politics-as-usual. We have had nothing but politicians who stayed in their jobs, like they’re supposed to, for years now. Everyone who gains even the smallest approval from the pundits and the GOP leadership fits the profile. Cursus honorem: representative, senator, senator-for-life, governor. There are plenty of politicians-as-usual. And they all disappoint conservatives by growing government instead of paring it, spending instead of cutting back, compromising instead of standing firm, and backing down time and again from confrontations with disastrous Democratic policies.

There are many, many – many – Americans who are no longer impressed with the qualities even the smartest political pundits consider essential in our politicians. We’ve had all the politicians who do everything the way they are supposed to – and their record is inexpressibly unimpressive. Many people have reached the point of saying, Don’t tell me only a politician who follows your set of rules is good for me. The rule-followers are the ones who have given us a national deficit so colossal we almost certainly can’t recover from it without severe economic dislocation – and an anomic, irresponsible, ignorant, and yet irrationally arrogant electoral demographic that voted Barack Obama into office, and threatens to make sure that government of, by, and for the people shall, if they have anything to do with it, perish from the earth, by next Thursday – and covered in a “Townhall” by ABC.

What we are enduring today is the America that the politics-as-usual rule-followers have delivered for us. It is far from unreasonable to recognize that having a comfortably conventional political profile, one that pleases Charles Krauthammer and Rick Brookhiser, is no indicator that a politician will guard constitutionalism, limitations on government, and individual liberty.

Absolutely right. Read the rest of it. We’ll learn soon enough if Palin really is the different kind of politician she purports to be, and in fact governed Alaska as. Hopefully she is; we’ve had enough of career politicans and the damage they do. What we need to bring this country back from the Leftist abyss is a leader, not a politician.