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Your logic is that she abdicated her governorship to save herself and her troops to fight again another day, right? Elected governor + fierce opposition = resignation...mine is if elected president + fierce opposition = ?.... you have a 50/50 proposition stay or go? Based on past performance the weighting would be?

Ahem, sorry, but you have to know better than that. Remember Einstein’s rule? Yes, you want to simplify an equation, but not to the point where it no longer represents the problem. And that is what you have done. You are still not using my logic, because my logic does not radically oversimplify the “opposition” term to a mere question of intensity; each time I presented my case, the “opposition” term was clearly qualified as to kind, not degree.

Consider: All people, and especially all politicians, face varying degrees of opposition to their objectives, including Palin. Indeed, she had to face down opposition of the most intense and intractable nature to reach her legislative objectives. Yet nothing in that opposition, however intense, impeded her public or private functionality, and she succeeded admirably.

But some opposition operates to create a real disability to function, where the only possible outcome of remaining in the state of conflict is to lose the game. This is not a question of intensity but structure. Some kinds of opposition can be overcome by toughing it out. Some can only be overcome by changing the game. From a game theory point of view, that’s the whole point of a strategic retreat. The parameters of the game, if you stay in the game, restrict the event tree to certain fixed progressions given certain early choices, i.e., outcomes of those early choices become absolutely predicable, regardless of effort expended. No amount of effort can undo certain deterministic structures.

In our military example, our field commander is unable to move forward without inviting fatal fire. If it were merely a question of, say, muscular intensity, or raw will power, he could just push harder against some hypothetical resistive object and eventually reach his goal without retreating. But that is not the structure of the problem, is it? The structure is such that all choices but exit result in exposure to lethal fire. If his real interest is surviving to win later, he must execute the one option that allows that to happen.

And what you and so many others are doing with Palin is suggesting the structure of the problem she had to solve is irrelevant, that all forms of opposition are functionally equal. That is nonsense, and that is the fatal diversion from my logic.

I remember taking a course in Boolean logic in college. It was one of my favorite courses in my CS program. Solving Boolean equations of any significant complexity is usually a matter of completeness and patience. But you will never solve a problem that is incorrectly or incompletely expressed. All the terms must be there and must be correct. Over-complexity can be sorted out. Oversimplification is fatal.

At one point in the course, the teacher gave me a special assignment. I took it home, worked on it through the afternoon and into the night, and could not solve it to save my life. I felt terrible, as though I had been doing so well, then failed. At the next class, when I had to tell her I couldn’t solve it, she told me no one else ever had either. What a relief. She gave it to me because she thought I might be able to do it. My own opinion is that there might have been some defect in the textbook, such that the problem could not be solved without correcting some errant expression buried in one or more terms.

The experience provided a valuable life lesson, though, on several levels. First, if you don’t express the problem fully, you r solution may not be just a little off, but completely wrong. So always try to account for everything before you think you know the answer. I have found this beneficial in my law practice as well. I have beaten very talented, more experienced people, whose only deficiency is that they did not work as hard as I did at fully boxing in the problem at hand.

Second, sometimes life dumps puzzles in your lap that are just unsolvable if you stay within the parameters of the problem as stated. Such problems cease to be a test of your skill in puzzle solving and instead become a test of your judgment and character. Like Star Trek’s infamous Kobayashi Maru simulation, if you are irrevocably committed to never losing an unwinnable game, sometimes your best bet really is to reprogram the game. That’s exactly what Palin did.

BTW, yes, I noticed my temporal inconsistency with George Washington title’s just moments after hitting the “post” button. Alas that we cannot edit our posts once sent, but such is life. And I knew you would pick up on it too. To clarify then, my point was that General Washington, the de facto Commander in Chief before there was one so designated by the Constitution, was an adept user of strategic retreat, and it was no impediment to his acclamation either as a good general or later as a good president. It’s just something any good leader will use when necessary. Palin did use it, and under the circumstances it was the right and the best thing to do. As you have steadfastly refused to formally contest that point, I must assume you agree with it.

Continue if you wish. I’ll leave the light on for you. :)

Peace,