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There's a difference between being a truly strong maternal figure, and using one's maternal status - hyped to the roof - as a political prop. It's like elevating McCain as a father figure, when he can't even get along with his own kids. Or all those Republican "family men" who dump their first, and sometimes second and third, wives.
If Palin really wanted to protect her family from the onslaught of press coverage and political diviseveness, then I might understand her resigning her office early - assuming she then retreated from the public eye. But as she has made clear with every action starting with her resignation, she has resigned because she has a "higher calling" and wants to affect policy on "another scale," obviously a national scale. (If not a world or cosmic scale; she is nothing if not grandiose.) This is not exactly going to take her family members off the table as public figures.
For someone horrified by attacks on her family, she sure knows how to magnify those attacks, keep them in the media spotlight, and use them to improve her position as America's Martyr.
