When and how did Rush weigh in?
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_070309/content/01125118.guest.html
RUSH: This is Rush. I’m on a golf vacation, parts unknown, all week long. Six cities, six courses, starting today. On this Palin business, you know, one of the reasons I haven’t said anything to anybody is I don’t know what this means – and I think all of this is just speculation. We don’t know what her reasons for doing this are yet. The speculation here and the predictions here rival some of the irresponsibility I saw with people speculating on the cause of death of Michael Jackson when nobody knew – and we still don’t know with Michael Jackson. We think we do but we don’t. We haven’t had an official autopsy report.
As far as I know, nobody in Palin’s camp or Palin herself has said what the hell this is about and why she’s doing this. So everybody’s guessing and everybody’s applying their own, either inside-the-Beltway formulas to this... All I know is this: If Sarah Palin has any desire to do a TV show, to do speeches, to raise money, to earn money – whatever it’s for – if she has any desire for a future, be it in politics, be it in media or whatever, she’s going to have to do it in the Lower 48. She cannot do it in Alaska. It’s not going to get it done.
I don’t think this precludes her running for office down the road, the presidency in 2012, at all. I think these people saying that she’s an instant target because she quit, that’s just inside-the-Beltway formulaic and she’s not that. If anything this woman, her m.o. is outside-the-box and not formulaic. So until we know what this is all about, I think it’s just everybody trying to be the smartest person in the room trying to predict or analyze, when nobody can really know. All I know is that she is going to continue to fire-up people in the conservative Republican base as often as she speaks to ‘em.
Judging from my emails, I haven’t seen a whole lot of ‘em from people who are disappointed or who will throw her overboard like a lot of people are. It boils down to this: When you have so many establishment types – inside-the-Beltway, elite, establishment types (Republican, Democrat, it doesn’t matter) – just so eager to destroy this woman, it means they’re still scared to death of her. And that, to me, is the bottom line. You know, I’m living proof that you do things outside the box, that you don’t do them formulaically – and if you do it the right way, you don’t have to be part of a formula.
And I think it’s one of the problems with D.C. Beltway types and wannabe D.C. Beltway analyst types or whatever. So I hope this helps, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you I know for sure what this means because I don’t, ‘cause I haven’t heard her say – I haven’t heard anybody in her camp say – what this is all about and why she’s doing it. It’s all just speculation, and until we know, it’s just stupid to sit here and say, “I know for sure what she’s doing,” when nobody does except her – and she’ll tell us at some point, and then we’ll know.