Palin Wows with Humor, Teaching and Political Philosophy at CPAC

Sarah Palin gave a great speech with a Reaganesque mix of humor, teaching and political philosophy.



Some of the highlights:

- The Tea Party rose up because Americans woke up. [3:45]

- Candidate Obama, he promised to fundamentally transform America, and that’s one promise that he has kept. Transforming a shining city on a hill into a sinking ship. Promising to cut deficits in half, and instead he’s piled on trillions more in debt, trillions more. $135,000 per taxpayer just in this new debt, $3 million dollars more a minute, and no plan to stop it. No plan. No budget. Going on a thousand and some odd days and still no budget. He mucked it up. Folks, this government isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed; it is too big to ignore, and it’s too big to bear anymore. [4:35]

- Hope and change. Yeah, you gotta hope things change. [6:40]

- Well, Mr. President we don’t want an economy built to last. We want an economy built to grow, and we certainly we don’t want your economy built to last. We want your administration to end. [9:35]

- We believe real recovery can’t get underway until government gets out of the way. [10:45]

- Government digging us deeper and deeper into debt, it’s not because the tax is too little, it’s because it spends too much. We know how to deal with that debt. You cut it, gut it, get rid of it. Americans shouldn’t have to spend their lives working so hard so Washington can spend easy. [11:10]

- He says that he has a jobs plan now, a jobs plan to win the future. WTF. I know. And I’m the idiot. WTF plan. Well he’ll invest your money in bullet trains to nowhere, but he’ll stop Boeing from building airplanes anywhere. Bankrupt green energy companies get sweet loans and grant offers, but oil pipelines not allowed to give you job offers. . . . We have a better jobs plan, and it’s called the free market. And it worked before this president, and it will work again after this president. [11:40]

- We believe that every child is created equal with that right to life. And I ask you to stand up for those who cannot stand for themselves. If not us, who? [14:35]

- No, we will never apologize for America’s strength and our greatness. And we will refuse to accept that a weaker America means a better and safer world. [17:35]

- The divide between Washington and the rest of the country, it has never been greater, and it has never been more dangerous. While America struggles, Washington prospers. And while our real estate markets crash, Washington’s is strong. We’ve suffered massive job losses out there, but Washington is hiring. But the question is they‘re hiring for what? They don’t manufacture, they don’t mine, they don’t drill, they don’t harvest. They produce nothing, and the services that they provide, they increase dependency not freedom. They don’t create wealth; they take it. This is Obama’s Washington. It’s not the Washington of our Founders, but the Washington of the permanent political class. [19:10]

- Friends, there is no such sense of urgency here in Obama’s Washington. Because life around here is really good materially. Our permanent political class is content. They’re immune to the realities that the rest of us face. See, they exempt themselves. They play by a different set of rules. Look at, say, their EPA. EPA, it’s imperiling private industry. It’s imperiling our energy independence, the steps that we need to take to be secure, and it’s enslaving us really to these foreign, dangerous supplies of energy instead of tapping into our own God-given sources of energy here under foot. That’s what the EPA’s all about right now. And, you have to ask yourself, though, well when was the last time you saw the EPA prevent constructing, say, a new government building. Maybe instead of calling Washington a swamp, we should call it a wetlands. Maybe that will slow down the growth of government. [21:10]

- But this Washington is a place where politicians they arrive as men and women of modest means, and they become plutocrats. The money making opportunities for D.C. politicians are really endless. But they don’t just enrich themselves off of you for themselves, they spread the wealth around to their pals. And this has a name. It’s called crony capitalism. I said in a speech in America’s breadbasket over the summer I said this isn’t the capitalism of free man and free markets, of risk and sacrifice, of innovation and hard work. No, it’s the capitalism of connections and of government bailouts, and handouts, and waste, and corporate welfare and corruption. This is the capitalism of Barack Obama and the permanent political class. And it’s why I say to the Occupy protesters: You’re occupying the wrong place. You’re protesting the wrong thing. This crony capitalism is a root of our economic problems. It has spurred the expansion of government which diminishes, of course, freedom and opportunity for all to rise and to succeed. See some politicians get elected by promising more programs and new freebies and new favors and then government grows to accommodate their promises. It never shrinks. And that crowds out the liberating individual initiative and equal opportunity that America was built upon. It swallows up the work ethic that we try to teach our children and it extinguishes that independent, pioneering American spirit. Now often they come to D.C. denouncing the place as you know the cesspool of corruption, but after a year or two they decide it’s not a cesspool. More like a hot tub. And they’re hopping in and enjoying the jacuzzi. Well, America, it is time that we drain the jacuzzi, and we throw the bums out with the bath water. [22:45]

- Be aware, Washington, Tea Party patriots are alive and well. We’ll elect more, and this time, Establishment, we expect them to get leadership posts in Congress. [27:15]

- But to fix Obama’s Washington, to return power to the people, we must replace Obama at the ballot box. He is sinking our ship of state. When a ship is going down the last thing you need is a community organizer just reorganizing the deck chairs while singing “Let’s Stay Together”. [27:35]

- We should not forget that for all of his lofty rhetoric and all of his song, you know, President Obama is a Chicago politician where graft, cronyism, quid pro quo, that’s the Chicago way. I came from a state with a corruption problem too. The difference is, though you don’t make many friends in the establishment doing it, I fought the corrupt political machine. Barack Obama, though, he used it. He used it to advance. He never challenged it. He never changed it. He brought it here with him. [28:10]

- We don’t know who our nominee will be, but we know that this election will be hard fought. Our nominee must be ready, strong, fortified, passionate, a fighter for American ideals. Our candidate must be someone who can instinctively turn right to constitutional conservative principles. It’s too late in the game to teach it or to spin it at this point. It’s either there or it isn’t. [29:30]