I'm fully aware of how tired this subject has become, but, dammit, I'm plunking down my two cents:

As the old-school GOP's pseudo-sexual den mother fades into obscurity, we speculate endlessly on what sucked away the air 'neath Sarah Palin's wings.

Scandal? Possibly. Although... scandal seems a common and forgivable resume entry for Alaskan politicians. Laziness? Hmm. We know this: She hasn't studied a whole lot besides bow-hunting manuals or practiced much anything other than "Hey, sailor" winks. 

Simplifying the possibilities, though, it just might have been Sarah Palin's own party that turned her out to pasture. She may be under pressure from the GOP to just go away, simply because, to the vast majority of American voters, she symbolizes everything wrong with contemporary American machine politics.

Puffed to leggy life as stodgy, encrusted John McCain's political trophy wife for the 2008 campaign, she's hung around just long enough to become a tired joke.

Palin is the evidence of just how deep runs Republican contempt for American voters. This political estate isn't the mom and pop GOP backbone, but the big boy sector - with expense accounts and Capitol Hill numbers in their cellphone menus. At this hoity-toity level, there is absolute, commonly held faith a blowfish can become President if it's campaigned with the right camera angles and constant, constant spin-control.

Trouble is, they crossed the line with this faltering soon-to-be ex-governor of Alaska. Americans aren't that dumb. She merits the presidency of the United States in the same way I deserve to be... well... Miss Alaska. And everybody knows it.

Regardless of the immediate trigger for her self-demolition, Sarah Palin had long-ago crossed the insipidity line, where average American voters recoil from naked puppetry and sound-bite Eveready bunnies. Right now it's a background awareness, unspoken and not yet realized - a stink in the air nobody can quite trace.

The GOP doesn't want that yowling pussy popping out of the bag.

It's better she retreat to the deep background. Maybe... join Fox News down here in the lower 48. Sure, they'll keep the options open. See what kind of temperature she can raise out on the rubber-chicken circuit. It all depends on how the next four years spread out. If things get much worse for everyday folk out here, the age of the American polling place may be over. Who knows? But even in that bleak scenario, beauty queens won't be mistaken for saviors-of-the-moment.

Americans are willing to roll the dice if they like what they hear in a Presidential contender. Playboys. Broken-down B-movie actors. Silver-spoon scions unable to master a native language.

But Palin falls way short. And all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge in the world can't turn a salmon into a killer whale.