Frank Rich's take on Sarah Palin is well worth the read.

No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

As a critic of Palin I have received more than a small portion of this anger and I choose to wear it as badge of honor, because it is not about attacking a woman who I disagree with politically, it is about stripping away the facade that Sarah hides behind and allowing the world to see who, and what, she really is.

She is NOT the humble hockey mom that she tries so hard to portray herself as. Instead she is a narcissistic, amoral, psychopath who will do ANYTHING to gain, and cling to, power.

She is dangerous because she attracts the most damaged and marginalized supporters in the country. These are America's version of the Taliban.

They would gladly throw themselves off of a cliff to further the ambitions of their queen, and it only takes the most perfunctory reading of some of the comments posted at a pro-Palin site to quickly convince anyone that my assessment is chillingly accurate.

So as gratifying as it is to see Palin step away from Alaska's helm, I know that she still represents a real danger to the rest of the country. And there is still much work to do.