Black Republicans: Palin 'no longer fit to lead'

Palin: I quit Alaska governorship so that 'obstructionists wouldn't win'

Sarah Palin's passionate and repeated defense of talk show host Dr. Laura shows the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate is "no longer fit to lead," prominent black conservatives say.

The Daily Beast's John Avlon interviewed black leaders in the Republican Party and conservative movement and found few willing to back Palin's defense of Laura Schlessinger, who announced this week she would be ending her long-running radio show after using the "n-word" 11 times during a debate with a caller.

Michel Faulkner, a Republican challenging House Rep. Charlie Rangel in this fall's election, told Avlon: “Why Sarah Palin feels she needs to join in to Dr. Laura’s personal meltdown is beyond me. She’s sounding like she just likes to hear her own voice—and the voice that she has is no longer credible. It says that a leading voice among conservatives has joined the ranks of the entertainers—trying to shock us each day with more and more outlandish commentary. And at that moment that person is no longer fit to lead.”

The anger at Palin coming from black conservatives led Avlon to conclude that Palin "might finally have gone too far and picked a fight she cannot win."

Palin sent out a series of Tweets earlier this week, urging Dr. Laura not to be silenced by the anger over her comments. "Don't retreat ... reload!" Palin urged Schlessinger.

"Lady, are you kidding me?" Faulkner asked. "That is scary language in anyone’s terminology. Sarah Palin scares me."

Conservative columnist Deroy Murdock "took an even harder line" with Palin, the Daily Beast reports:

Sarah Palin's tweets resemble something scribbled by a ninth-grade cheerleader. Is it asking too much for a reputed American political leader to communicate in complete sentences? Palin's gravitas gap is growing into the Gravitas Canyon,” said the media fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. “Even worse, she deploys her vacuity to defend an acerbic talk-show host who just detonated herself by tossing around the word 'ni**er' on the air 11 times, as if it were a volleyball. The American right can do better than this. And it must.

California tea partier Joe Hicks disputed Palin's assertion Schlessinger's First Amendment Rights "ceased to exist" over the controversy.

First Amendment rights? Of course. But [Dr. Laura] wasn’t fired—she decided to drop her show. So I’m not exactly understanding what Sarah Palin’s understanding of the Constitution is here. And it isn’t completely out of character, which is very unfortunate. She keeps dropping this bizarre stuff ... It says this woman really has no larger vision of what she is trying to do in a political sense—there’s a pretty narrow intellect at work here ... Attempting to defend the indefensible is just kind of insulting.

Palin, for her part, continued to defend Dr. Laura in Facebook postings this week.

"Does anyone seriously believe that Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a racist? Anyone, I mean, who isn’t already accusing all conservatives, Republicans, Tea Party Americans, etc., etc., etc. of being racists?" she wrote.

Palin went on to equate her own struggles with media and public opinion to Dr. Laura's and even suggested that her heavily criticized decision to quit the Alaska governorship was a result of an effort by Palin's political opponents "to silence those with whom they disagree."

I learned this valuable lesson when the partisan obstructionists in my state tried to shackle, bankrupt, and destroy my family and supporters, and my record, with endless frivolous litigation when I returned from the Vice Presidential campaign trail. In order to shake off the shackles they wanted to paralyze us with, I handed the reins to another, much like Dr. Laura is doing, so that these obstructionists who hated a Commonsense Conservative agenda wouldn’t win.