Not her ability to rev up the right wing -- anyone who's read the comments on Peggy Noonan's latest column knows that the Palinistas are fanatics. But I don't think there are enough fanatics in America to get Palin to the GOP nomination, let alone the White House:

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

But would a Palin candidacy resemble Goldwater's 1964 debacle? Maybe -- if the Republicans managed to unite around her. I am not convinced that they would do so. Having Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket would cause unbearable torsion within the party, and would certainly result in the nuttiest political convention the world has ever seen, something like the 700 Club guest-hosted by Glenn Beck. It could well crack the party in two, forcing the minority of moderate and mainstream GOPers out of the party to form their own center-right coalition.

This might sound preposterous, but consider the damage done to the Republican "brand" over the last few years. That brand is not indestructible, and one has to wonder how long the sane people will stay if the truly crazy people gain total control and decide to take the party out in one last blaze of glorious martyrdom.

A Palin candidacy, therefore, might result in a replay of George Wallace's 1968 run. It would be a regional candidacy fueled by everything Wallace exploited - paranoia, class resentment, fear of the future, and a cult of personality built around a single defiant demagogue.

And the Republican dissidents -- let's call them the New Whigs -- would go to their own corner and wait for their chance to pick up the pieces.

There would be a lot of pieces to pick up.

In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

....Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

It would be difficult to convey to a young person today the very odd -- even revolutionary -- feeling you had the first time you used a Walkman. You'd be walking down the street, the music blasting in your ears the way it would if your stereo at home was cranked up to 11, but no one else heard it. You were in a different space, effectively checked out of the world. William Gibson had that feeling too when, as a poverty-stricken young man in 1979, he scraped together $200 and bought an early Walkman. It was the experience of being transported by the machine that inspired him to coin the word "cyberspace" -- a place simultaneously vivid and unreal.

Now Sully's been (understandably) pretty gung-ho in his support of the Iranian protesters and (understandably) pretty angry at their treatment at the hands of the mullahs; it makes sense that he'd post a music video, sent in by one of his readers, that gives voice to that protest.

Note that the video itself is an amusing pastiche of cable news channel tropes and it features an anchor in the studio and a correspondent from a remote site, both singing mockingly of "democracy", while we see footage of soldiers pushing civilians around, firing weapons, and behaving in a threatening manner.

But if you watch the whole thing through, something becomes obvious: the scenes of violence are happening in Iraq, not Iran. And the soldiers who are oppressing innocent people aren't Iranians, they're Americans.

I'm not sure if Sully understood that the video was bashing American leaders, not Iranian ones. Based on the title of his post, I'm guessing not.

Naw. All these theorists were wrong. They were trying to fit the square peg of Palin's nutty decision into the round hole of logic. Yesterday she issued a statement that was supposedly going to "clarify" the remarks she made in her goofball press conference. The only thing she clarified is that she's crazy as a coconut:

How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make.

This idea of some greater mission came up in Friday's statement as well. To what "higher calling" does she refer? How can her decision be "about country" today when Friday it was about, alternately, Alaska and her family?

And who are the "countless others" who have answered the "higher calling" before they managed to serve a full term of office? I suppose she's referring to Obama here, though Obama didn't resign; and his opponents weren't shy about pointing to his status as a freshman senator during the campaign. Moreover, when he announced his run he was widely criticized as arrogant, a talented young man who was perhaps in too much of a hurry. Everyone knew, of course, that it was Hillary's turn, and he was never going to beat that juggernaut. Had Obama lost in the primaries, or the general, there is little doubt that he would have completed his first Senate term and run for a second in 2010.

Even if you grant that Obama's decision was analogous to Palin's -- and I don't -- who are the other "countless" politicians who have done the same?

I've never thought I needed a title before one's name to forge progress in America. I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. I hope you will join me. Now is the time to rebuild and help our nation achieve greatness!

Yes, you can influence the political debate from the outside. But it's easier from the inside, which happens to be where Palin is. Her strategic thinking is strangely reminiscent of The Great Gonzo's in The Muppet Movie:

One great way to celebrate our nation's birthday is to read up on its history. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently discussed James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom on his blog recently, and I went out and got a copy. I would recommend it as a great single-volume history of the Civil War. It gets deep into the underlying assumptions and attitudes of people in those days, which makes it a bit more useful than the Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton histories which (good as they are ) tend to get absorbed in the minutiae of military tactics in specific battles.

The excuses she makes, and those bandied about by her supporters, ring false. It is possible, of course, that the grueling task of running the state of Alaska have so cut into her family time that she must step aside.

But Alaska is a small state. Its legislature convenes for only a couple of weeks a year. If she can't withstand the insane pressure-cooker of Juneau politics, how could she argue that she's qualified to be President of the United States?

Similarly, a former one-term governor, or current second-term governor, would have a certain amount of credibility on the campaign trail in 2012. But a former governor who resigned before she finished even one term? Huh?

She complained in her press conference, as she always does, that the media was picking on her, that it was picking on her family. Again, it's hard to see how a persecution complex is going to help get her elected to the White House. Does she think she would get less media scrutiny as President than what she's getting right now?

Palin's move is very reminiscent of Ross Perot's goofy unraveling in the 1992 Presidential campaign. Perot -- who was actually leading in the polls that summer -- suddenly dropped out. Stung by accusations that he was "a quitter", Perot jumped back in that fall, claiming that he'd left the race because the Republicans were plotting to sabotage his daughter's wedding. The problem with this explanation was simple: even if you decided that he wasn't suffering from paranoid delusions, you still had to wonder if you should vote for a guy who could be so easily blackmailed.

Palin is in an analogous situation. The public might pity her enough to accept her explanation for resigning. But no amount of pity will get her into the White House.

CONTEST EATERS FACE OBESITY, OTHER HEALTH RISKS

What?! People who competitively gorge themselves have a higher risk of obesity? I'd better click through and read that one right away.

On the utterly content-free front:

10 HUMOR SITES SURE TO MAKE YOU LOL

Slow news day, you think?

Or this one -- pretty much tailor-made for cable news:

TEACHER LEAKS SEX TAPE TO HER STUDENTS

Hey, I have a question: where the hell were all these teachers when I was in school?

Then we have a headline that combines the lurid rubbernecking appeal of flesh-eating viruses with the mawkishness of sick but saintly children:

BOY EATEN BY LAKE BACTERIA WANTS ICE CREAM

After a headline like that, there's no point in reading the story. Just tell me where to send the check.

After a long, embarrassed silence for most of the day, National Review Online finally weighed in on the Bernie Madoff sentence. You will recall that our Bernie got a 150-year sentence for running a multi-million-dollar, decades-long Ponzi scheme. But NRO's Eli Lehrer says that punishing the guy makes no sense whatsoever:

Putting Madoff in prison, of course, does nothing to protect society. He harmed people through the bloodless act of stealing their money. So long as he doesn’t start an investment firm — something that’s not going to happen — he’s no threat to society. Deterring future cons along the same lines as Madoff’s, of course, provides a pretty good reason to imprison Madoff. But a longer sentence seems unlikely to change the deterrence factor very much. No high-living investment manager wants to spend any time in prison and the certainty of any sentence for fraud provides sufficient deterrence. Nearly all sophisticated white-collar criminals operate on the basis that they are too smart to get caught.

Weren't most of the victims rich investors who failed to do due diligence on too-good-to-be-true returns? And don't we suspect that some of them knew it was a Ponzi scheme but that they would be among the winners?

Of course! What investor wouldn't want to put his money in what he knew to be a crook's Ponzi scheme? Too bad Bush isn't still in the White House -- he'd probably be pinning the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Madoff's chest at this very moment.

Meanwhile, Ray Walser opines on the military overthrow of the democratically elected government in Honduras, an act which has been condemned by the OAS and the State department:

[T]he Obama administration is in a pickle. Utopians in the administration believe the Organization of American States, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and the State Department can all work comfortably together to put Zelaya back in power and, thus, "defend democracy." But "Mad" Mel's penchant is for mob democracy. And realists fear a restoration to power would only produce vendetta politics and populism of the worst sort. A few souls in Washington are leery about promptly delivering Honduras into the eager hands of Hugo Chávez and company.

Warts and all, the U.S. should find a way to recognize that the new government of Honduras has preserved constitutional order and that Zelaya is the problem, not the solution.

"Mob democracy": what an interesting phrase! It is, of course, an oxymoron -- unless you happen to regard democracy, and a constitutional government, as itself a form of mob rule. That has certainly been the National Review's editorial policy for the last half-century.

They are not necessarily against democracy, as long as the mob -- er, excuse me, the people -- don't make the wrong choices.

BOMC was strictly a mail-order operation. You got a little card in the mail every month that told you what the main selection was. If you weren't interested in the main selection, you could choose from a list of alternates. If you forgot to send your card in, or sent it late, the main selection would be mailed to you automatically. So BOMC was not a good deal for people who were busy, or who frequented bookstores, or who knew what they wanted.

However, it was a good deal for certain types of people: shut-ins, mainly. Or people who lived in ghost towns of the southwest. Agoraphobes. Indecisive people. Transylvanian counts. Gatsbyesque characters who were into self-improvement. Residents of strict Islamic countries where access to porn was banned. People who would read anything. You get the idea.

You might think that Book-of-the-Month Club would be a bucolic, intellectually stimulating place to work, full of bookish, interesting people who delighted in ideas and wordplay and saw their business as an opportunity for service, a mission to bring literacy and enlightenment to the benighted provinces of the world.

You would be wrong.

In fact, BOMC was a wildly dysfunctional den of intrigue, paranoia and inefficiency. Most employees were dimwits and screwups; most managers were backbiting incompetents. The human resources department existed mainly to bamboozle sexually-harassed employees into believing that they had no rights under the law.

At one point a company vice-president was fired, and this was handled in much the same way that the Soviet Union might handle the firing of a senior official: the person in question simply vanished one day, and when people began asking questions about her whereabouts, the HR department grudgingly issued a terse statement saying that she had suddenly decided it was time for her to resign so that she could walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. There was a peculiar finality to that phrase, as if she had sent on a death march. She was erased from the photographs, she had ceased to be. She had become an unperson. Within the company we jokingly referred to people who'd been terminated as "walking the Appalachian Trail". It was a ghost road, a trail from which you never returned.

All this came back to me as I read the deeply weird story of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who has been missing since last Thursday after checking out an SUV from the state's law enforcement division. He told no one where he was going -- not his wife, not his security detail. After several days of mixed messages and conflicting stories, his staff announced that he had been "walking the Appalachian Trail", which after all these years sent shivers down my spine.

Good God, no. Not that. He has a wife and kids, you know.