Hearing the news of Sarah Palin's speech announcing her upcoming resignation from the Alaska governorship, I touched base with Leah Burton, author of Theopalinism: The face of Failed Extremism and author of the blog, Theopalinism. But Lisa Derrick, writing for FireDogLake had beaten me to it. As Derrick writes on her blog,
Leah Burton-the author of the book TheoPalinism: The Face of Failed Extremism and creator of the blog theopalinism.com whose testimony about Wayne Anthony Ross led to him being passed over as Alaksa attorney general has a good take on Palin's resignation, based on her perspective as a Palin watchdog. We spoke a right after Palin's speech. Says Burton:
She is prepping to start a "full court press" nationally to whip up her base into a frenzy! This is going to get ugly... Anybody who thinks she going away is crazy.
...Burton feels Palin wants to stay in the spotlight and is
mad that Newt and Mitt can run around while's she's stuck in Alaska.
Leah Burton's take syncs with a just-published LA Times op-ed by Lisa Richardson, which reads Palin's surprise resignation announcement as an offensive move:
There's a huge void in the Republican Party and she's moving to fill it. So watch out Rush! Sarah Palin vs. Rush Limbaugh. What can this resignation mean except a frontal assault on talk radio?
...She got a ton of money with that book deal, so she doesn't need the job. And now she avoids the charge of shirking her duties every time she flees the state to attend a fancy dinner in the lower 48. I bet Alaska didn't have a chance of keeping her after floods forced her to stay home and be gubernatorial while Todd had a ball at the White House Correspondents' dinner. You know she just hated missing that.
While I simply cannot believe Palin would make a serious run at the presidency, I'm certainly hoping she will.
National Public Radio's Ron Elving seems to concur, writing, Palin: Really Retreating Or Just Reloading?
The move carries a tinge of desperation, and the rolling scandals that seem to dog Palin have only peripherally touched on the (former) Alaska Governor and GOP presidential candidate's association with two publicly professed witch hunters and Sarah Palin's close affiliation with the New Apostolic Reformation, a global movement that is rapidly redefining Christianity. As I explained to journalist Bill Berkowitz in a recent interview, mainstream media has so far missed Palin's association with the aggressively supremacist New Apostolic movement but,
Sarah Palin is, broadly speaking, in the emerging postdenominational movement, which by 2000 encompassed 385 million Christians and is vastly different from the faith as it has been practiced in recent centuries. We identified Palin as in a majority tendency of postdenominationalism known as the neocharismatic movement, or the "Third Wave."
Evangelical missionary reference work World Christian Trends calls the Third Wave "a new and disturbingly different" kind of Christianity whose members "can accurately be called radical Christians with some pentecostal /charismatic parallels" and which has, as one of the distinctive characteristics of Third Wave Christian ministry, a heavy emphasis on healing miracles including raising the dead--an emphasis promoted from the pulpit in sermons at Palin's most central church, the Wasilla Assembly of God.