UPDATE: Sarah Palin lies about "drill, baby, drill"
June 02, 2010 12:40 pm ET by Simon Maloy
After lying about death panels, the Bridge to Nowhere, aerial hunting, and pretty much everything else she's known for, it should come as no surprise that half-term governor turned Fox News analyst Sarah Palin would lie about the mantra that came to define her ill-fated run for the vice presidency: "Drill, baby, drill!"
And lie she did -- here's Sarah Palin on Twitter wagging her digital finger at the "Extreme Greenies" regarding the Gulf oil spill: "[S]ee now why we push'drill,baby,drill'of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?"
The message is clear: "drill, baby, drill" was never about dangerous offshore drilling like the Deepwater Horizon site, it was about safe "onshore" locations like ANWR.
Except that it wasn't.
Here, for example, is Sarah Palin at an October 21, 2008, campaign event in Reno, with emphasis added:
PALIN: John [McCain] and I have to adopt an all-of-the-above approach to meet America's great energy challenge for you. That means harnessing alternative sources, like wind, and solar, and biomass, and geothermal.
(APPLAUSE)
And we will develop clean-coal technology. And we will safely drill for the billions of barrels of oil that we have underground, including off-shore.
(APPLAUSE)
We will drill here, we'll drill now, and that's when you start the chant. Yes.
AUDIENCE: Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill!
PALIN: You bet. We'll drill, baby, drill, and we'll mine, baby, mine, as your placard said, yes.
Nevada, it is for our nation's security's sake and this is for our nation's economic prosperity and job opportunities in our future. We need American energy resources brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers.
And here she is the day before in Loveland, Colorado:
PALIN: And whether Joe Biden approves it or not, we will develop clean coal technology and we will safely drill for the billions of barrels of oil that are warehoused underground, including our offshore sources. We will drill here and drill now. (Cheers, applause.) Drill, baby, drill. Drill, baby, drill.
And three days before that, in West Chester, Ohio:
PALIN: It's nonsense, the road that we have about on. And we will change that. We will safely drill for the billions of barrels of oil that we have here in the U.S.
(APPLAUSE)
AUDIENCE: Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill!
PALIN: Drill, baby, drill. That's right.
(APPLAUSE)
AUDIENCE: Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill!
(APPLAUSE)
PALIN: It also means safely tapping into our offshore sources, safely, environmentally safe.
UPDATE: Just last month, Sarah Palin said the Gulf oil spill should not change our posture towards offshore drilling at all. Asked by Fox News' Greta Van Susteren if "we should continue to go full speed ahead with the offshore drilling" in the wake of the spill, Palin responded: "Absolutely."
From the May 14 edition of Fox News' On the Record:
VAN SUSTEREN: All right, so now we know that they don't do that. Shouldn't we at least put a halt on all offshore drilling because if they did it here on this particular rig, what would in any way give us confidence on any other rig?
PALIN: No, we are too reliant on oil.
VAN SUSTEREN: So we just keep drilling?
PALIN: We have to keep drilling. We have to learn from the mistakes that have been made with this Gulf spill. We have to get to the bottom of it, what caused it and we still don't know that.
VAN SUSTEREN: In the meantime, though, until we get to the bottom of it, you think we should continue to go full speed ahead with the offshore drilling?
PALIN: Absolutely.
VAN SUSTEREN: Even until we get to the bottom of this.
PALIN: Absolutely. There is that inherent link between our own domestic energy supplies, production of, and our own security and prosperity and our own freedom in America.
Now, that has a familiar ring to it ... oh yeah, that was Lay, Lady, Lay." :-)
There are places that are pretty safe to drill, and there are places that are less safe to drill.
There are places where, if a spill or leak occurs, the environment won't be terribly devastated, although it will be hurt. And there are places where, if oil impacts the environment, that effect will be felt very powerfully!
The ridiculous notion that there are "safe" places to drill is very offensive to me, and should be to any American. When we're examining what energy policies our nation should follow, we should always consider the costs and the benefits, and there's no "safe" places to drill!
And so Palin lies in a couple of ways here - in that she DID classify offshore sites as locations where she applied the "drill, baby, drill" mantra, and that there's any place where drilling is environmentally safe.
Ravishing:
Extremely attractive; entrancing.
Maybe she means that the coastline looks better with the oil rings on the marsh plants and the glistening sheen of oil on the still waters. (?)
The only problem I see with Sarah Palin using that word in that way is that Sarah Palin isn't that smart. Perhaps one of her handlers decided to make the comment for her or something, because I just don't see Palin being smart enough to even know there is such a thing as personification, much less know how to use it in a literary sense (and even then the attempted use of personification in this instance takes a bit of interpretation).
The eight years of Dubya were bad enough for the English language (like when he called the Pakistanis "Pakis" on a live broadcast!), if Sarah Palin ever got near a public forum where she'd be required to speak to groups of people that aren't all blindfolded and brainwashed, I shudder to think what kind of a disaster the language would be in.
But, then, her public appearances are limited to groups of fawning sycophants, aren't they?
The woman is a very out of touch and confused individual with no propensity to learn the things she doesn't know, and this is according to Steve Schmidt.
Our oceans are acidifying, there is more drought, more floods, more severe weather and we are pushing the environmental threshold to the point where species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate and disease is becoming more widespread. On top of that all the fossil fuels we pump into the atmosphere is causing 30, 000 deaths each year in the U.S due to asthma attacks. I mean, the external costs of our appetite for fossil fuels is far more than what we pay at the pump.
Drilling for oil is not safe, no matter what. We need to start prioritizing our efforts into alternative energy, fast.
It will do no good. We can still hope that after this BP debacle, no voter will again trust Big Oil, and will be suspicious of pols (and FOX natterers) who support them.
See, BP's North American headquarters are in a suburb of Chicago! And that fact is why BP employees donated to Obama in greater amounts than to Republicans! But no Republican who pointed out the BP contributions ever told you that, did they?
Its really wierd, she takes no responsibility for her words, and her following holds her to no standard of accountability for anythign she says.
As tired as Orwellian cliches are these days, they represent a disturbing and clear approximtion of double think.
"What a lovely day to lie my keyster off!" she says to the sun that, in her world, rises in the west.
Randy