Normally we don’t recycle last night’s “Quote of the Day” but I’m making a special exception for this for two reasons. One: I’m surprised that one of my dopey posts was able to push Sarahcuda’s take on weed out to big news outfits like Politico and CBS. What makes me think they got it from Hot Air? Well, both sites claimed in their write-ups that Palin had made her remarks on Wednesday night — but that’s simply not true. We posted it last night, but her appearance on Judge Napolitano’s show actually happened a few days ago. Tsk tsk, fact-checkers.

Two: The “Quote of the Day” post didn’t give me a chance to gloat. Who was it, remind me, who pushed the “Palin should champion the potheads” argument a few months ago? Awww yeah. Let me be even more obnoxious than usual and quote myself:

She can’t [champion legalization] if she’s running in 2012. Conservative Republicans, i.e. her base, oppose legalization 20/77; a bold stroke on this front would scare a bunch of them into Huckabee’s camp. If she’s not running, though, then I can see an argument for it. One of her big problems, especially with centrists, is the media’s caricature of her as some sort of fire-breathing theocon, which she isn’t. She’s made moves to chip away at that — the Rand Paul endorsement, and of course campaigning for Maverick instead of Hayworth — but it’s hard to scramble a narrative purely through associations. She needs an issue, and this one is fairly low-cost with a few major benefits. Taking a modest pro-legalization position (i.e. “I don’t use it myself and don’t want kids using it, but…”) would (a) electrify the debate over a hot-button issue, which she obviously relishes doing (see, e.g., “death panels”), (b) prove that she doesn’t mindlessly follow Republican orthodoxy, which would force centrists and libertarians to give her a second look, (c) mindfark the media, which would be on her side for once, and (d) reestablish her political identity as a western, not southern, conservative. The west was, after all, the only region of the country that supported legalization when Gallup polled the issue in October.

I stand by every word. In fairness, Sarahcuda did not take a “modest pro-legalization” position on Napolitano’s show — she wants it illegal to keep it away from kids — but this reads like a very modest anti-legalization position to me:

“Well, if we’re talking about pot, I’m not for the legalization of pot because I think that that would just encourage, especially, our young people to think that it was OK to go ahead and use it. And I’m not an advocate for that. However, I think that we need to prioritize our law enforcement efforts. And if somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm, then perhaps there are other things that our cops should be looking at to engage in and try to clean up some of the other problems that we have in society that are appropriate for law enforcement to do and not concentrate on such a, relatively speaking, minimal problem that we have in the country.”

In other words, okay for adults but not for little ones. Isn’t that indistinguishable from America’s alcohol policy, though? If she’s going to go this far and basically call for cops to look the other way at non-violent adult users, why not go the whole nine yards and embrace legalization with age limits? Or is that the next step once social conservatives acclimate themselves to her current position? Exit question: Second look at “true conservative” support for weed?