I haven't written any main posts for a couple of days and did a lot of thinking about the blog during this break. My original idea was to start campaigning for Obama as soon as Sarah Palin made her announcement about not running. I would have turned Palingates into a satire blog, with Sarah Palin as Obama's most enthusiastic cheerleader.
But after a couple of days away, I realized that I have reached my limit and that I can't be a slave to the computer anymore. Following Sarah Palin in recent months wasn't the most arduous of tasks, the posts wrote themselves. If I tried to turn my attentions to Obama, it would be a very different ball game, as I would have to spend much more of my time doing research about him than I did about Sarah Palin. There are many excellent blogs covering general politics and they do a better job of it than I could ever hope to achieve.
Another added factor is that our Billy is coming back from Australia in a couple of weeks. We haven't seen him in two years, so I doubt I would find the time to write many in-depth posts about anything in the coming weeks.
I would love to continue posting the daily open threads, though. I enjoy them too much! They would give the community their usual meeting place and you could still send in your contributions, exchange views, ideas and links, discuss politics or whatever took your fancy.
After two and a half years of a daily dose of Sarah Palin, I'm more than ready to take a breather from the topic. I'll continue to follow the events and if anything worth commenting comes up, I'll write a post, but I simply can't find the energy to do it on a daily basis anymore.
Sarah Palin has always been irrelevant because of who she is, because she has nothing important to say, but for three years she was a dangerous irrelevance. Now that the immediate threat has passed, I think I've earned a bit of downtime.
That's how I feel at this very moment, but you never know, I may miss it too much, make a full comeback and resume business as usual, especially if Sarah Palin proves to be too much of a nuisance, albeit without a "title."
Please let me know how you feel about having only the open threads. Would you find Palingates still worthwhile? Would you continue to visit and have a chat? Do you think Palingates has run its course? If you decide* you don't want a blog without the regular "meat" I'll call it a day. I would miss the community, but I wouldn't miss Sarah Palin, that's for sure!
[*I would not delete the blog, it would stay as it is and become a reference blog, with all the Palingates and other resources intact.]
Here's a bonus photo, she looks really hot:
