Sarah Palin energized a group of social conservatives at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference Saturday, blasting the Obama Administration’s apparent lawlessness, calling the current state of America “Orwellian,” and urging the United States to stay out of Syria’s chaotic and brutal civil war.
In comments to the Daily Caller, the 2008 candidate for vice president also declined to join many of her fellow Republicans in condemning National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, saying the real problem was the government’s violation of Americans’ rights.
In her speech, Palin called the current political atmosphere, rife with scandals, “a symptom of a bigger disease,” expressing outrage over the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative nonprofits.
“You don’t marginalize everyday, average Americans. Those, who are part of the tea party, that want to protect the constitution,” said the former Alaska governor. “The IRS can’t figure out how it spent $4 million dollars on a training conference because it lost its receipts … really?”
The 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee said President Obama has lost the trust of the American people.
“Like the other day,” she said “[Director of National Security Intelligence James Clapper] bragging that they used the ‘least untruthful statement.’ Now, where I come from that is called a lie. Yes, the officials lied and government spied — and in Benghazi government lied and Americans died.”
Palin appeared confident and comfortable on stage while inveighing against the NSA tracking American citizens’ phone calls, noting that domestic spying had not prevented the Boston Marathon bombings.
“Our government spied on every one of your phone calls, but they couldn’t find two pot-smoking deadbeat Bostonians with a hotline to terrorist central in Chechnya,” said the Alaska Republican, “And it’s built an apparatus to sneak into all of the good guy’s communications, but whoopsie daisy, it missed the Fort Hood mass murder of our troops despite this Islamic terrorist declaring his ideology in numerous army counseling sessions and even on his own business cards.”
Palin’s biggest reaction of the day came when she jabbed at President Obama’s apparent decision to send military aid to the Sunni opposition to Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Asad.
“We’re taking on more new interventions?” said Palin. “In these radical Islamic countries that are not even respecting basic human rights — where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over some arbitrary red line, ‘Allahu Akbar.’ I say until we have someone who knows what they’re doing, I say let Allah sort it out.” The punch line received a roar of laughter from the Faith and Freedom Coalition audience.
Not all of Palin’s comments stayed within party lines. Speaking with The Daily Caller after her speech, she seemed to break with her 2008 running mate, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, over NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
“Edward Snowden today is not the problem,” she told TheDC. “The problem is what the government is doing to usurp our rights.”
Palin also criticized Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s claim that immigrants are more “fertile” and create more business than native-born Americans.
“I think it is kind of dangerous territory, touchy territory, to want to debate this over one race’s fertility rate over another,” the mother of five told TheDC. “And I say this as someone who is kind of fertile herself. I don’t think that is where we want to go in deciding how we will incentivize the hardworking, responsible families who want to be in the line, follow the law and become Americans versus those whose very first act on our soil is to break the law.”
Palin added that her first thought about Bush’s fertility remark was, “‘Oh, men.'” But she turned serious when slamming the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration bill.
“Let’s not kid ourselves in believing that we can rebuild our majority by passing pandering, rewarding-the-rule-breakers, still-no-border-security, special-interest-written amnesty bill,” she said.
For the future, Sarah Palin is optimistic about her return as a Fox News contributor, where she will start Monday morning as “Fox and Friends contributor. She told TheDC, “I am very happy to get to be a part of Fox News again. I mean, its unsurpassed the reach that they have.”
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