Palin Fires Releases Scheunemann, Hires Breitbart BFF Peter Schweizer to Replace Him

It was announced this morning that Sarah Palin has let Randy Scheunemann go. He had been working with or for Palin periodically, since the McCain campaign. In his place, SarahPAC has hired Hoover Institute fellow, Andrew Breitbart associate and Reagan worshipper, Peter Schweizer, to run her foreign policy shop:

Sarah Palin has a new foreign policy adviser. Out is Randy Scheunemann, one of the few remaining links to her time on the McCain/Palin ticket, and in is Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Scheunemann was a key foreign policy adviser to the campaign of Senator John McCain, and a played a huge role advising Palin during her debate prep. He stuck with her after the election. But now, Tim Crawford, the Treasurer for SarahPac, tells ABC News, “Randy couldn't give us the time that the Governor required.”

Scheunemann is the President of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” and is seen as something of a NeoConservative, supportive of a far-reaching American foreign policy. He worked for Palin along with Michael Goldfarb, a former writer at the Weekly Standard.

Incoming adviser Peter Schweizer is seen to view the United States with a more limited role in world affairs.

The shift in adviser might have been reflected in a foreign policy speech Palin delivered last night in Colorado. She called on American foreign policy to have “clearly defined objectives.” In recent weeks she has been critical of U.S. policy in Libya for its “lack of clarity.”

Here's the speech referred to in the article. It drew a crowd of about 350 people, and was laden with conspiracy theory fluff:


Schweizer recently joined prominent Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, to become a part of Andrew Breitbart's Big PEACE web page. Here's Gaffney and Schweizer talking about the "roll-out" of BigPEACE.com:


It is probably too early to tell if the hire of Schweizer will change Palin's positions on foreign policy. Other than her often-repeated simplistic mantras, she really doesn't have an articulated foreign policy platform per se. Beyond American and Israeli exceptionalism and a fascist-oriented view on what our military can be allowed to do, she has ben fairly inconsistent, not to mention shallow.