Sarah Palin 'Energy Expert'

John McCain likes to lavish Sarah Palin with high praise. OK, it's a running-mate thing. Obama does it with Biden, too. But over the course of the last few weeks, the Arizona Senator, in his bid to introduce the country to Palin, has done his best to portray her as a reformer, a maverick, an enemy of earmarks, a singularly ethical person, and on and on. As each one of McCain's assertions has been shown to be less than credible, Palin's unfavorable ratings have steadily gone south. Truly, an unkonwn commodity is more valuable than one we have the opportunity to evaluate.

But of all the hyperbole McCain has used to describe Palin, to my mind, the single greatest overreach came when he declared that Palin "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America."

That's quite a claim. Well, here's some video taken earlier in the week of Palin at a campaign rally. She's being asked how we can insure all of the new oil that we'll be drilling for can stay right here in the U.S., and not be sent elsewhere:


The the transcribed version of her baffling remarks reads via ABC:

"Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first," Palin said. "So I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first."

Now, I don't claim to be an energy expert, but this question actually has a straight forward answer. Oil is a global commodity, and any oil our companies find automatically goes into the world market. That's why more drilling isn't really the solution, either in the long term or the short, to our energy problem.

And, for the record, when you supposedly know more about energy than anyone else in the country, you shouldn't resort to repeatedly lying about a basic energy statistic. Palin has often claimed that Alaska "produces 20 percent of U.S. domestic supply of energy." According to Factcheck.org, the governor is just a tad off. It's actually 3.5%.