When Huckabee brought up the tea party protests, Woolery spoke approvingly: "It's a grassroots movement, and I think it has legs. I can only pray as a citizen myself that this gains momentum, and people really start to turn on their government."
I can actually remember that Rush Limbaugh's television show in the 1990s once played a clip from Scrabble in which host Woolery admitted to liking Limbaugh after the word "Limbaugh" was revealed as the answer to a word puzzle in which the clue was: "He's been blamed for a lot of bad rush (Rush) hours." Woolery joked that the puzzle was made up by a "pinko commie," and declared, "I like Rush Limbaugh."
Below is a transcript of portions of the interview from the Saturday, November 28, Huckabee show on FNC:
CHUCK WOOLERY: How are you? Nice to see you. And I think one of the most quotable, one of the most quotable lines from Love Connection is when a guy looked at a girl and he said, "I've seen better legs on a bucket of chicken."
HUCKABEE: Did he really say that?
WOOLERY: Yeah, he said that.
HUCKABEE: You've got to have had some incredible things you saw and heard over the course of doing that show.
WOOLERY: I did, and thank God I don't have a very good memory.
HUCKABEE: Well, you know, talking about Love Connection, there’s a whole lot of people that are having a real hard time having a love connection with Congress right now. And, interestingly, Chuck, from what I tell, you're one of them, a little disappointed in what you're seeing.
WOOLERY: I'm one of the people who, you know, you keep talking about Senators and Congressmen are sacrificing for our country and giving up all their time. I'm now sacrificing my career coming out as a conservative. So I'll never be hired in Hollywood again once they find out I'm doing it on your show.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)
HUCKABEE: Yeah, that may, it may not be the conservative party, it may be being on my show that may kill your career.
WOOLERY: Whichever. I'm just taking every chance possible. The thing of it is, I believe that the word "career" and "politician" should never be linked together because, number one-
(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)
WOOLERY: Well, it's true. How many guys, how many, let me do a real quick little survey here. How many people here can leave their job for four years and then come back and everything’s just like it was? Okay. That's why we have career politicians. They don't have a job. They just are career politicians. They stay there forever. I mean, poor Senator Byrd, they wheeled him up there after 56 years. You know, at one time I'm sure he was vibrant, but, I think, after 12 years, his time was up.
HUCKABEE: You know, interestingly, when they asked him about being there 56 years, he says I look forward to the next 56, and I'm not making that up.
WOOLERY: No, no, Strom Thurmond said the same thing, his Republican counterpart, so – I’m not looking forward to it.
HUCKABEE: What about term limits, Chuck? Should we have limits on the length of time people can serve?
WOOLERY: Yes. I'm not sure how you get that done, but I tell you something, Congressmen should not be in there more than four years. They got to turn the people over because that power leads to corruption. And they can't help it. It seduces them. (AUDIENCE APPLAUSE) The more, the more they get seduced, the more power they have, the longer they want to stay. They will do anything to keep that job. And the American people like you and me, I mean, we're the only ones who can do anything about that. At this point, that's it. We vote them out. I always say vote for a bad guy you don't like and get rid of him in two years, just keep turning them over.
HUCKABEE: Yeah, it’s sort of like every appliance every now and then needs to have the handle pulled and it flushed to have fresh water come in. I'll leave it at that as to the vivid picture people have.
WOOLERY: I really believe this. I think that’s absolutely true and it's funny, too. ... Here’s a deal. I think personally that Washington really needs to be afraid of us. Deathly afraid of the people.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)
HUCKABEE: I love that. That’s right, Chuck.
WOOLERY: And right now, because of, because of the IRS, because of a lot of tools they have at their convenience that are power tools, they can drill us pretty good. We need to drill them so that they’re, and if they’re afraid, and if they’re afraid of us, they won't use those tools.
HUCKABEE: And we saw the fear that they had of their people when they wouldn't go to town hall meetings. They were scared to death of the tea party protesters, which I think was one of the great citizens uprisings in a lifetime. I’m grateful.
WOOLERY: It was. Linked with that, not only do I think they should not be able to serve more than four years or 12 years. I mean, the President only gets eight.
HUCKABEE: Yeah.
WOOLERY: So. The other thing is, no lawyers. If a guy is a lawyer and he’s running, or a woman, they shouldn’t be voted in. We have too many lawyers. There’s a practical reason. (AUDIENCE APPLAUSE) Here’s a practical reason. I loved it when [Congressman John] Dingell said, "Read the bill? Are you kidding? We never read the bill." They can't read the bill. And these people would go to town hall meetings and they would have segments of the bill that they knew, and the Congressmen and Senators would go, "What?" They hadn’t got a clue what they were talking about. So then they’d go back and they’d read the bill and they would come back and try to defend it, and they still couldn’t understand it because lawyers writ it, wrote it, and they writ it, too. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) But lawyers, they can’t even understand what each other said.
...
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HUCKABEE: We are back with Chuck Woolery. When we were talking before, Chuck, you outed yourself as a conservative. Now, it really is kind of unusual, at least we think of it, in the entertainment world for people to be openly conservative. What was that it that made you say, you know what, I think the conservative idea of government’s more for me?
WOOLERY: I have no idea. I honestly did not have one of those moments where everything changed and I fell in love. I don’t know. One thing I do remember is I was doing Home and Family with your producer, Woody Frasier. And I had to go in for a four-way bypass. And so I went to Cedar Sinai, and they wheeled me in the thing – well, after the surgery everybody was laughing, the doctors were laughing, the nurses. I'm in ICU recovering. And I said, "What is so funny?" as best I could say it. And they said, "Well, we sedated you and we were ready to do the bypass and you sat up and you said" – I had no idea I did this – he said, "You sat up and said, ‘I'm the only conservative in Southern California, and Bob Dole is running for President. If I die, someone has to promise me that they'll vote for him,’" and I laid down. I had no idea I'd done it.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
HUCKABEE: There was a subconscious moment.
WOOLERY: Can you imagine you're going into a life and death situation worried about Bob Dole? Give me a break!
HUCKABEE: What about the citizens? We mentioned the tea parties. You’ve seen this happen across the country. There’s been a contemptuous attitude from people like Nancy Pelosi, but do you think you’re seeing authentic, just, angst from citizens?
WOOLERY: Well, this certainly isn’t astroturf, is it? It's a grassroots movement, and I think it has legs. I can only pray as a citizen myself that this gains momentum, and people really start to turn on their government. I really believe that. And when we say "turn on the government," that’s kind of a loaded way to look at it. They have become arrogant and so disconnected with the people, that it's time we take our government – it's our government, it's not theirs. We need to take it away from them.
HUCKABEE: What about Chuck Woolery for Congress? Is that in your future?
WOOLERY: Well, you know, it's funny. When I was in high school, I remember a neighbor friend of ours, Mrs. Shotland who was from New York who moved to Kentucky, and she said to me, "You should be in politics." And I said, "I don’t think I'd do very well because I tell the truth." And that’s the problem. And think that there’s so, everything is so politically correct these days, and people are just tiptoeing around the edges and tiptoeing through the tulips that you can't say anything or mean anything without offending everyone. Consequently, nothing ever gets said and never gets done.
HUCKABEE: Chuck, I want to ask you-
WOOLERY: Can I say one other thing?
HUCKABEE: Yeah, please do.
WOOLERY: And I would really like to have your opinion on this because I thought about this the last day, it came to my mind. It seems to me like, and correct me if I'm wrong, the closer you are to the Constitution, the farther right you are considered to be.
HUCKABEE: Interesting.
WOOLERY: The farther away you are from the Constitution, the farther left you appear to be. Would you that, would you agree with that? Am I wrong?
(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)
HUCKABEE: You know, I would, but, obviously, the liberals say that’s nonsense, but-
WOOLERY: My whole point is, why isn’t the Constitution in the middle and people are either moving either toward it or away from it, whatever? But it’s either right or its left. It’s not in the middle where it should be.
HUCKABEE: That’s a very astute observation. I’ve never heard anyone say it, and that’s why I’m going to be the first to sign up and contribute to the Chuck Woolery for Congress fund. I'm going to be on your team. Chuck, great to have you here. Gotta come back sometime because I want to hear some old stories of the Love Connection and a whole lot of things. Chuck’s probably got more stories than we could ever get to. What a great guy. Give a big hand to Chuck Woolery, everybody.
