Palin kills 'em in Safari Club speech

Toward the end of the Safari Club International convention Saturday night in Reno, after dinner in a casino ballroom, the globetrotting big-game shooters were getting antsy for the main attraction. Newsweek's Andrew Romano says the "roar of the crowd" when Sarah Palin walked onstage was "positively leonine." Palin brought more politics than usual to the Safari Club's annual gathering -- with the expected warning against more gun control in the wake of the Tucson shootings and an "of course" reference to sympathy for the victims -- but mainly she kept the crowd entertained with a stream of one-liners.

[Palin] admits that she "threw a little politics" into her recent TLC reality show by dragging the crew to the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge on the pretense of hunting caribou. Her real purpose? Showing viewers that ANWR is a "barren, desolate, less-than-pristine place"--perfect, in other words, for lots of new oil drilling. "If a caribou needs to be sacrificed for the sake of energy independence," she adds, "I say, 'Mr. Caribou, maybe you need to take one for the team.'"

She mentions how some media figures have pledged not cover her at all in February, and says the boycott "sounds good" to her "because there's a lot of chaos in Cairo, and I can't wait to not get blamed for it--at least for a month." She even cites her children's Christian names as evidence of her outdoorswoman cred. "Piper was named after Todd's airplane, the Piper cub, which gets us to the hunting grounds," she explains. "Bristol, Bristol Bay fishing grounds. Willow, a local sport-fishing stream. Trig, I pull the TRIG-ger. Track... I remember when we told my dad that his grandson was named Track, he said, 'Like TRACKing an elephant?'"

Outside the banquet hall, amid the hard-core gun-rights contituency, Romano was able to find a few convention-goers willing to endorse more controls on handguns "with no sporting purpose." But mostly the atmosphere was defensive.

Back in the Tuscany Ballroom, Palin is doing her part to cheer up the congregation, punctuating her remarks with one-liners that wouldn't have been out of place at Wednesday's dinner with Larry the Cable Guy. "My family loves animals in the wild-and also next to the mashed potatoes. "For most of these frou-frou, chi-chi types, the extent of their experience is in the Tiki Room at Disneyland." "We eat organic-we just have to shoot it first. And it comes wrapped in fur, not cellophane." The Safari Clubbers are going wild.

Fisherman's Choice Charters