Sarah Palin’s Anti-Reality Energy Rant Invites Mockery

The increasingly irrelevant VP-losing, half-term serving, un-reality TV has-been, Sarah Palin, has climbed atop her Facebook soapbox once again to show the world that she has not yet exhausted her supply of incoherent policy positions and dopey cliches.

In a posting titled, “Obama’s Anti-American Energy Policies Invite the Next Crisis,” Palin gets just about everything wrong and calls President Obama a traitor in the process. The woman who coined the term “death panel” obviously has no better understanding of international energy markets than she does of health insurance reform. And the purpose of her posting is to advance the same tired myth about oil production and prices that she and the GOP have been peddling for years.

Srah Palin - Mythbusters

The posting begins on a note of delirium with Palin asserting that Obama “likes to take credit for actions initiated by the last administration.” Credit? Credit for what? Destroying the economy? Starting two wars? $4.00 per gallon gasoline? I think the word Palin is looking for is blame. And since Obama certainly doesn’t want any of that, her point is pure lunacy. Particularly the part where she says…

“[Obama]’s not interested in lowering the price of gas because exorbitantly high gas prices are one of his campaign promises.”

Of course. Because every political analyst knows that higher gas prices are the one sure way to guarantee reelection. It’s almost as good as high unemployment, which Republicans have also accused Obama of causing deliberately (to enslave people, or something).

The crux of Palin’s argument is a regurgitation of the standard Republican mantra to “drill, baby, drill.” She and her GOP comrades have invented a theory that gas prices are increasing because of low supply and that if we have more of it prices would decline. The problem with that theory is that all of the evidence refutes it.

McClatchy: “U.S. demand for oil and refined products — including gasoline — is down sharply from last year, so much that United States has actually become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it makes.”

So what benefit would there be to producing more domestic oil if we are just going to ship it to other countries? If more supply would lower prices all we would have to do is stop exporting the gas we are producing now, but the domestic market would not support that. So what is the cause of higher prices? According to experts it is the inordinate impact of speculators and the instability in the Middle East, a point on which both Palin and Obama agree. However, Palin’s solution is “to drill here and drill now,” which we already know is no solution at all.

In a speech on energy yesterday, Obama responded to criticisms from his opponents by noting that “Only in politics do people root for bad news.” Palin took that missive as advice and declared that “I guarantee the rising prices will only get worse.” Nowhere does Palin cite the basis for her guarantee, nor how the guarantee will compensate anyone foolish enough to put their faith in it. I’d want to get it in writing. Obama also mocked the right’s energy strategy as a political stunt:

“You can bet that since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their 3-point plan for $2 gas. And I’ll save you the suspense. Step one is to drill and step two is to drill. And then step three is to keep drilling.”

Once again, Palin took Obama’s mockery as a model for her platform. She literally proposed a 3-point plan, the day after Obama predicted it, that consisted of drilling (in Alaska), drilling (in Canada), and more drilling (for natural gas). And all the while she continues to ignore the reality that there is no deficiency in supply. In fact, the right’s (and Palin’s) favorite energy boondoggle, the KeystoneXL pipeline, is specifically designed to transport oil from Canada to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico so that it can be exported. If it were intended for domestic use they could build a much shorter pipeline to refineries in the Midwest.

There is a reason that Sarah Palin has become so irrelevant, and it has to do mostly with what she does and says herself. This Facebook energy treatise is merely the latest example of her monumental inability to shape a coherent thought. To say that she invites mockery is an understatement. She literally begs for it.