Sarah Palin returns to Fox: What did she say?

Sarah Palin goes lite on whistleblower Edward Snowden – 'nothing will ever be the same for this man' – and calls for 'more revelations' about what a 'big, overgrown government' is doing.

|
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) speaks during the Faith and Freedom Coalition Road to Majority 2013 conference Saturday in Washington. Ms. Palin, the conference's final speaker, rejected calls for an immigration overhaul that includes a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

Sarah Palin is back on “Fox and Friends” Monday morning. The appearance marks her return as a paid contributor to Fox after a multimonth hiatus that began when her old $1 million-per-annum contract with the network expired.

So did she say anything liberals will find outrageous and tea party members will love?

Well, we’d judge that she was pretty restrained during her chat-up for the F and F team. Her best line came at the start, when they showed a clip of her speech from over the weekend at the Faith and Freedom Coalition annual conference in Washington, D.C.

Congress should “put themselves on Ted Cruz control for a week," said Ms. Palin in the clip.

(Sen. Ted (R) Cruz of Texas was a phone-in guest, which was the way they played that bit, and not her comment that the US should “let Allah sort it out” in Syria, instead of ramping up military aid to Syrian rebels.)

After that, Palin talked a bit about her upcoming Christmas book, which she described as a legal primer to “pushing back on the politically correct who would try to take the Christ out of Christmas," but also a “festive and jolly” book with recipes.

Then she spent a lot of time conflating the IRS scandal, in which agency officials vetting applications for nonprofit 501(c)(4) status singled out politically conservative groups for special scrutiny, and recent revelations about the extent to which the National Security Agency (NSA) captures the communications data of Americans.

“This is one big ball of wax of a big, overgrown government that has gotten out of control and the people have had enough,” said the former Alaska governor.

She was not that hard on NSA leaker and self-described whistleblower Edward Snowden, observing at one point that “nothing will ever be the same for this man” (true!), and also saying that “I think that the issue again is that government is so large and so intrusive in all aspects of life that we need more revelations, we need more truth about what our administration is doing."

Thus, Palin unsurprisingly appears to be going with fellow tea party favorite Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky on this, decrying the possible decay in US civil liberties as opposed to branding Mr. Snowden a possible source for Chinese intelligence, which is the ex-VP Dick Cheney approach.

However, on the national airwaves she did not go so far as to repeat the judgment she’d expressed in her Faith & Freedom conference speech that the NSA “couldn’t find two pot-smoking deadbeat Bostonians with a hotline to terrorist central in Chechnya ... really?”

Maybe she’ll ramp things up in appearances to come.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Sarah Palin returns to Fox: What did she say?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2013/0617/Sarah-Palin-returns-to-Fox-What-did-she-say
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe