Sarah Palin Is Nothing More Than “Conservative” Entertainment

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Sarah Palin does provide wonderful comedic relief to CPAC and other events like this.  To put her in the league of the thoughtful, critical-thinking, intelligent — I’ve got to be careful how I say this — intelligent imaginative conservative, I think, is just a stretch.  She is great for the base, they love her, but what she talks about usually and what usually comes from her is just boilerplate cliché.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  You and I have discussed this thousands of times on this show here.  Sarah Palin does provide wonderful comedic relief to CPAC and other events like this.  To put her in the league of the thoughtful, critical-thinking, intelligent — I’ve got to be careful how I say this — intelligent imaginative conservative, I think, is just a stretch.  She is great for the base, they love her, but what she talks about usually and what usually comes from her is just boilerplate cliché.  It’s almost as if you were going to parody or satire a female Republican, that’s what you would get.  I’m not saying that is in every instance, but in far too many instances.  I don’t know about you, but I was on vacation and Gorab tried to get me to go in that day.  [mocking] “You’ve got to go in, Mike.” — “Why?” — “Sarah Palin just resigned as governor of Alaska.” — “So?  Send Webb in there.  Let him do it.  I’m on vacation.  I’ve got a rollercoaster to tackle.”

AG:  I think it’s a problem with a number of politicians.  I look at as if you run for office and you are given the blessing of the people through votes to be elected, you have a duty and it’s honorable —

Mike:  What’s that?  What’s duty?  Honorable?  Did you just say honorable?  What’s that?

AG:  I think there’s a great responsibility, if you’re elected to office, to serve the people.  It’s probably not apples to apples, but for Palin to step down — she didn’t step down for a health reason or some kind of tragedy.  She just chose to step down.  By all accounts, she grew tired of it.  I think she’s lost her ability to criticize other politicians.  Likewise, I think it’s a joke if South Carolina elects Sanford to serve again.  He lost that ability to be a representative.

Mike:  When he resigned.

AG:  Yeah, because of the scandal that was involved in taking trips and lying about it while in office.  If we want to be critical of Democrats for — let’s say Menendez.  There have been a bunch of allegations of prostitution, with helping out donors.

Mike:  Bribery.

AG:  There’s a bunch of that.  You’ve got to look inward, too.  If we’re pushing forth people like Sanford and to a lesser extent Sarah Palin — she deserted office.  She was elected and deserted the office.  She could be a great conservative thinker possibly.  I don’t know if she is or is not.

Mike:  Thinker?

AG:  She takes a hokey stunt of the 7Eleven big gulp up there.  We’re supposed to be intelligent and we’re pushing forth candidates who disgrace the office or who resign to start a reality show?  That’s the best we have?  I think that’s embarrassing.

Mike:  Amen to that, brother.  I’m glad you said it and not me.  I’m sending all the hate mail to you.  [mocking] “I heard what you said.”  I can read my email box right now.

AG:  There have got to be better representatives for the Republican Party.

Mike:  Forget the party for a moment, how about just for thoughtful, imaginative, and intelligent conservatism.  There have to be smart people out there.  The next thing will be “Why don’t you run?”  Number one, I have no desire to hold a public office because I don’t want to be put in a position like Governor Palin was or Mark Sanford was where, if I were to attain such an office, I would find out that I’m pretty inert in that capacity and would probably want to quit it.  That’s the first thing.  The second thing is, I’ve lived a very full life.  I have a closet and it’s got bones in it.  I have no desire to drag my children and my misses through that.  That’s what politics is today, not that it hasn’t always been that way.  Had I had an eye on being elected someday, maybe I would have conducted my private affairs a little differently than I did.  I don’t think I’m abnormal.  I think we all have skeletons.  These days, you can’t have any.  If you have any, they become the issue instead of the issues.  I just don’t see where that would be productive.  I think I can do just as good of work on the outside as I could from the inside.  That’s my story.

I will say this, though, if no one in the State of Louisiana runs against Mary Landrieu — she is not going to run unopposed.  That just cannot happen.  There are those inside the GOP that are saying we shouldn’t waste a campaign in supporting a candidate against Mary because she’s probably going to win.  The only reason Landrieu will win, number one because of bailouts, and number two because she can carry the Parish of Orleans by 85-15, which gives enough votes to win a statewide election.  This is another instance in which Louisiana could be divided up into four different republics and we would be free of having the Parish of Orleans screw up our electoral colleges.  We would just be left to screw them up.

AG:  Here’s the thing, Mike.  There’s so much made about Palin and her speech.  That’s really overshadowed a lot of the speeches that took place at CPAC this past weekend, and to what end?  What comes out of that that’s a positive going forward that conservatives, Republicans, libertarians — what can they rally behind out of CPAC?  It’s not Sarah Palin taking a dig at Karl Rove.  For media to play that up, I think, is a disservice.  I just don’t see her as a leader.  When you resign from office because you’re tired of it, sorry, you lose.  Go make your reality shows.  Go be on Discovery.  Go have your daughter do whatever she did on Lifetime or TLC, whatever that is.  You can’t be a voice for the conservative party going forward, as nice as she might be.  I don’t know if she’s the person you want leading the conservative movement.  Then you look at the straw poll results.  I think there are a lot more serious candidates that got a lot of percentage there compared to Sarah Palin, yet Sarah Palin is the one making all the news on Monday morning, because she and Karl Rove got in some silly spat.

Mike:  That’s because the right-wing press has made her the beaux ideal.  They have made an anti-intellectual, as you said quitter, the face of modern conservatism, which quite frankly I think is both laughable and tragic.  Who steps in to fill that void?  Who is going to have the chutzpah to actually say that, other than yours truly?  [mocking] “You’re on the Patriot Channel.  She was up against Obama.  She’s a heroine.”  Again, we are so devoid of seriousness when it comes to many things.  We want to carp, complain, cry and whine about things.  In our politics and in our discussions, we are, by and large, a not-very-serious bunch.  When someone does try to be serious, they are derided, they are maligned and made fun of, mocked.

Just look at the pushback against Rand Paul’s minor insurgency.  Even at CPAC, the Pollak guy was taking a shot at Rand.  What did Rand do?  Rand stood up there and argued for the Constitution, the rule of law, and for the American government to swear and pledge that it does not kill its citizens and won’t kill its citizens in any kind of a collateral attempt to take out some alleged terrorist.  You laugh at that and mock that?  [mocking] “That’s not how we want to be.  That’s not the kind of party we want to be.”  Really?  So what do you want to be?  You want to be the party of another Iraq?  You want another 190,000 dead, 134,000 civilians, suicides in your own military ranks out the wazoo, $2.2 trillion in unfunded liabilities for a war that we couldn’t afford and refuse to pay for?  That’s what you stand for?  Really?  Seriously?  Maybe that crowd is deserved of Sarah Palin.

End Mike Church Show Transcript