Sarah, We Hardly Knew Ya'

Speaking from her backyard, Mrs. Palin said that she wanted to spend more time with her family. However, the continuing attacks on her family and the necessity of paying down massive legal bills for her defense against various politically motivated actions was a contributing factor. For the record, the most popular governor in America - according to all polls - was vindicated in each and every instance.

Mrs. Palin turned the political world on its head when she was picked by Senator McCain to be his vice president on the GOP ticket last year. She was young, beautiful, plainspoken, charismatic, and a true homegrown political maverick with a life story that is the stuff of movies.

The Wonder from the Tundra had grown up in blue-collar surroundings in the Last Frontier and bootstrapped her way through life. She didn't come from a wealthy family. She wasn't a carpetbagger riding her husband's coattails into office. She was unabashedly pro-life, and pro-American. She could dribble a basketball, catch wild game, shoot a rifle, field-dress a moose, and wear a bathing suit. She had graduated from a small college, majored in journalism, and worked as a sports announcer. She had been the mayor, run a small business, and opposed the leaders in her own party. She was married to a bush pilot who was a quarter Eskimo and she had kept her Down Syndrome child, instead of aborting it.

Despite that compelling narrative, the left and its unindicted co-conspirators attacked her with a ferocity that defies description. Mrs. Palin became the subject of the most cruel lies and innuendo. She was sandbagged by the media. She was sandblasted by the late-night comedians.

Her e-mail account was hacked into and her communications posted on the Internet. Her reputation was dragged through the mud. No less an organ than the New York Times trolled her daughter's high school classmates, searching for mud about her.

Even after the election, Mrs. Palin was the subject of unrelenting ridicule and villification. Through it all, she conducted herself with dignity. We'll never forget her good sportsmanship when she called out in defeat: "God bless President Obama and his beautiful family."

That being said, we believe that the shock announcement indicates that the governor will run for president in 2016, not 2012, which is just as well. It's going to take time for people to realize that they've been had.

Mrs. Palin is by far the biggest draw in the political arena - even ahead of Mr. Obama. When she joined Mr. McCain, the GOP ticket surged. It was six points in front of the Democrats despite an unpopular war. Yet that's why even the Thriller from Wasilla couldn't forestall the disaster that struck when stock market took a nosedive and the election was handed to the least qualified presidential candidate of all time. We take Vice President Biden, the secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the former president, Bill Clinton, at their word.

That's why 2016 should be an interesting year. By then, people will have sorted out precisley why the idea of a strong, smart, powerful independent woman strikes fear into people who supposedly support the cause of strong, smart, powerful independent women.

Could it be that feminism is a Trojan horse for leftism, and that Mrs. Palin, as a consequence, didn't fit the bill?

Liberalism, like cancer, requires an enormous blood supply of taxes to satiate its appetite. It feeds off the fat of the welfare state. Mrs. Palin is the antithesis of that. She's the embodiment of "Don't tread on me," of God, family and country, and of "Live free or die."

She's personally devout. She's beautiful. She's athletic. She's unpretentious. She's down to earth. If you listen to her for 5 minutes, you know her life story and what she''s all about. She's a new and improved version of Everywoman.

Mrs. Palin's no self-pitying apostle of victimhood. And she's not one to begin a debate with the assumption that America is wrong. That's why her meteoric ascendancy has exposed the media's vicious and nakedly leftist agenda and become one of her greatest victories. Try this litmus test at a party: Just mention the name Palin. You'll be amazed.

To us, it's passing strange that the same people who preach evolution can't believe that the dinosaurs of feminism, well along the road to extinction, have taken a positive detour and evolved. Indeed, Mrs. Palin represents a new and ascendant line.

You don't have to hate men to believe in women's liberation. You don't have to believe in infanticide. You don't have to be a closet communist. You can believe in the right to keep and bear arms. You can believe in lower taxes and less government.

You can believe that drilling for oil is better than dreaming about utopia for the next hundred years. You can say out loud that it's okay to drink and to smoke and eat fattening foods with lots of salt, if that's your bent.

Alas, we see the desperate young faces on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village. We see them in the chic stores and salons on the Upper East Side. We see them in the cafes along Columbus Avenue: the frustrated faces of desperate young women, buried in the mute oracles of their iPhones and Blackberries, seeking a ray of light to help with their personal lives, which are going no where, thanks to the false promises of radical feminism.

All in all, those who hate Mrs. Palin - those who wish her dead - hate her because she's not part of the radical elite, the people who used to be called penthouse communists. You've met them: They're personally greedy while making a show of their thinly disguised brand of Marxism. They wring their hands over the plight of the poor while residing on high floors of luxury doorman buildings in best neighborhoods. They're hypocrites and envious of her happiness, and the promise that she represents for women across the fruited plain. Their outcry represents the last desperate Druidic scream of the hard left

In the next few years, the reaction to the profligate spending, feckless, enfeebled foreign policy, dozing domestic security, and extremist social engineering of the liberal Democrats will sweep them out of office. And then all Americans will enjoy the epoch of Sarah Palin.

The point is, there are a million more like her. They're everywhere. They just needed a leader to stand up and say: "This is how I see things."

May her tribe increase. When she returns, it will be with a vengeance. She has our support, if ever she needs it. She has our voice, if ever she seeks it. She has our vote, if ever she requires it.