Wingnuts rush to protect Sarah.

The wingnuts had decided that Palin was their new hero so we should have expected their reaction to her departure from office to be dramatic, but Erick Erickson over at Red State takes it to a new level:

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.

Erickson has decided to portray this as if it was the attacks on Palin's children which drove her from office. This is, of course, complete supposition on his part; but it's the course he chooses so that he can portray Palin as a victim "gang raped" by the left. To see Palin as a victim here we would have to forget that she called Obama a man who "pallied around with terrorists". We would have to ignore the cries of "Kill him!" which regularly interrupted her rallies when she made these bizarre claims.

Instead, we are asked to see Palin as a poor mother forced from office to protect her children. It really does ask that we ignore the hatred which this woman deliberately stirred up in the days leading up to the election.

"It's a dangerous road, but we have no choice," a top McCain strategist told the Daily News of their new strategy to attack Obama's character. "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose."

So, even the McCain campaign have admitted that Palin's strategy was "dangerous", so it's simply ludicrous to attempt to portray the woman who employed those tactics as somehow being hit below the belt by unscrupulous politicians on the left.

And Erickson then comes up with an even more bizarre analogy:

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.

The only problem with this theory is that there are many other rumours as to why Sarah Palin is standing down, and none of them relate to her children:

Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide open state.

SBS has close ties to the Palins. The company has not only sponsored Todd Palin’s snowmobile team, according to the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett, it hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004.

Though Todd Palin told Fox News he built his Lake Lucille home with the help of a few “buddies,” according to Barrett’s report, public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for the house. While serving as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin blocked an initiative that would have required the public filing of building permits—thus momentarily preventing the revelation of such suspicious information.

Just months before Palin left city hall to campaign for governor, she awarded a contract to SBS to help build the $13 million Wasilla Sports Complex. The most expensive building project in Wasilla history, the complex cost the city an addition $1.3 million in legal fees and threw it into severe long-term debt. For SBS, however, the bloated and bungled project was a cash cow.

The truth is that none of us truly know why she has stepped down. In the months to come that might start to become clearer, but it's insane at this moment in time to start to frame this as the left "attacking" Conservatives and their children. I personally think that Palin had gone as far as she was ever going to go. Taking part in the election had revealed her as woefully out of her depth. And recent articles, like the one in Vanity Fair, had only emphasised that point.

So, it's lunacy to think this is carte blanche for an attack on the left and the way they treat the children of Conservative politicians.

Click title for Erickson's article.

Tags: Sarah Palin, resignation