And now, just to be fair, the other side of the argument. Posted without editorial comment; you already know my opinion as someone who had never written a post critical of Palin before yesterday, and if you don’t, feel free to click on the links in the Top Picks column. Mary Matalin offers this analysis, transcript via Crooks & Liars:

MATALIN: Well, I think it’s really brilliant, with two caveats, one being that there’s nothing else, ala the Sanford fiasco. There’s nothing else that we don’t know. If all that’s there is what we see right now, it’s brilliant.

And, secondly, that she has a plan and people have a plan to put up with the conventional wisdom, chatterati and the political class saying how stupid it is, because it’s brilliant.

On the substance, there’s the key economic issue — I know everyone says — thinks it’s health care, but it’s really energy. And she’s the queen of energy.

And the second big issue for 2012 will be the role of government. And she has a record of reform and ethics reform and making government smaller and reigning in spending — all those issues that are getting increasingly important as Barack Obama expands on his agenda.

So — and her delivery was incredible — a charis — a less charismatic person probably couldn’t pull it off. But as — as already referenced, she will be freed up and liberated in the way Mitt Romney is here to run around and raise money and get political chips by spending it and get political capital. And she is still raising the kinds of crowds and money that she always did.

Follow the link to C&L if you want to hear a rebuttal from David Gergen and Ed Rollins, the latter of whom has been around Republican campaigns for a very long time.

Update: My caveat in the opening paragraph wasn’t about getting “beat up”; I’m a big boy, and I can take honest criticism. It’s correcting the falsehood in the comment strings that I’ve been a Palin-hater. If people actually read what I’ve written about Palin over the past year, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m going to give people my honest opinion, no matter what.

As for using the clip from C&L, er, so what? This segment is from CNN. I couldn’t find it on YouTube or on CNN’s site when I had a few minutes to post. Someone asked me if I would be fair and post Matalin’s defense after our criticism of Palin, and I posted what I could find of it.