The Sarah Palin Manifesto

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/19/11

When Sarah Palin went to speak at the Republican convention two years back a hurricane came in and shut it down. But I suppose it was just a coincidence that hundreds of tornados swept across the South when she gave her Wisconsin speech last week. Something to watch, like the apocalypse. When I was raising my kids there in lower Appalachia, apocalypse was well on the minds of the local radio preacher shamans in the mountains and in the serpent-handling so-called “primitive “ churches in the hollows, and without question it shadowed the judgment of the born-again George W. Bush and what might have been called then the “GOP establishment.”

Sarah Palin used the phrase “GOP establishment” in her April 15 speech in Wisconsin, and incidentally, she has also redesigned her web site, SarahPac.com, to look more Presidential. What with all the excitement with The Donald and tornados where they have never gone before, it might have gone unnoticed. The MSM, which she has promised not to goad again, breathes a sigh of relief that the storm has passed and Donald Trump is more fun to play with anyway because he lives in New York and is no real threat. But her speech was more than a speech: It was a manifesto. A few phrases:

Hello, Madison, Wisconsin! You look good. I feel like I’m at home. This is beautiful. Madison, I am proud to get to be with you today. Madison, these are the frontlines in the battle for the future of our country. This is where the line has been drawn in the sand. And I am proud to stand with you today in solidarity.

Well, I am in Madison today because this is where real courage and real integrity can be found. Courage is your governor and your legislators standing strong in the face of death threats and thug tactics. Courage is you all standing strong with them! You saw the forces aligned against fiscal reform. You saw the obstruction and the destruction. You saw these violent rent-a-mobs trash your capital and vandalize businesses.

Now, there’s a lesson here for the Beltway politicos, something they need to understand; the lesson comes from here in Madison. So, our lesson is to the GOP establishment first. And yeah, I’ll take on the GOP establishment. What more can they say about us, you know?

So, to the GOP establishment: if you stand on the platform, if you stand by your pledges, we will stand with you. We will fight with you, GOP. We have your back. Together we will win because America will win!

We didn’t elect you just to re-arrange the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. We didn’t elect you to just stand back and watch Obama re-distribute those deck chairs. What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight. Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women’s hockey team—those champions—maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl!

The words “courage” and “solidarity” occurred throughout and the speech in my impression seemed cleverly modeled on one by Lech Walesa given in the rise of the Polish anti-communist Solidarity movement in 1980, which took even leftist New York City by storm.

The MSM thinks now she will not run for President. What part of “going rogue” don’t they understand?