Sarah Palin, private citizen, continues to throw well placed wrenches into the works of the Obama administration by doing something for which she is constantly vilified by the left and unsupported by the right.
Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Most recently her comments about “Death Panels” in the health care legislation before Congress was the cause for great consternation, strum und drang among the punditocracy and even Barack Obama himself who seemed rather annoyed that private citizen Palin would have and express an opinion. Be that as it may, her words caused a lot of ripples in the pond of the health care debate which is increasingly NOT going Obama and the Democrat’s way.
Now Palin has struck again, reprising her role as the champion of Drill Baby Drill politics and trading on her reputation as something of an energy expert by blasting the administration’s plan to pump billions of U.S. tax dollars to Petrobas, the Brazilian oil company.
The Wall Street Journal opinion pages reports:
The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.
Yeah, you could say it’s odd.
Palin, in her inimitable way, asks the obvious questions that reports, pundits, and screaming ideologues don’t want asked and many others laugh at her (and regular people like us) for asking:
So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources?
Umm.. .that’s a good question Mrs. Palin. You must not really understand the complexities involved and the
Drill Baby Drill... just don't do it here.
environmental damage or economic concerns. After all you’re just a chick hick from Alaska.
I’ll speak for the talent I have personally witnessed on the oil fields in Alaska when I say no other country in the world has a stronger workforce than America, no other country in the world has better safety standards than America, and no other country in the world has stricter environmental standards than America. Come to Alaska to witness how oil and gas can be developed simultaneously with the preservation of our eco-system. America has the resources. We deserve the opportunity to develop our resources no less than the Brazilians. Millions of Americans know it is true: “Drill, baby, drill.” Alaska is proof you can drill and develop, and preserve nature, with its magnificent caribou herds passing by the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), completely unaffected. One has to wonder if Obama is playing politics and perhaps refusing a “win” for some states just to play to the left with our money.
So maybe you do know what you’re talking about. Let’s see how quickly the pundit class pounces and dismisses these legitimate questions and issues.
The Truth in Black and Right 
I like Sarah Palin, and would welcome a President Palin as a liberator. However, she is too lightweight, and her chronic oratorical folksiness is getting unnerving. Her resignation speech was rambling and near incoherent. Would I choose her over the current tyranny? You betcha.
I think it’s hard to argue that she’s a heavyweight intellect, but fortunately that isn’t needed in a president. I think her image has been definitely damaged by last year’s campaign and though I don’t find her particularly rambling, she definitely isn’t a rhetorical wonder girl. I think she also suffers the two edged sword of being an attractive woman, so that she is much more scrutinized than a man would be for similar failings. There are lots of men who aren’t stellar speakers or who are FAR more gaffe prone than Palin is, but they are not seen the same way (Joe Biden anyone?). The other problem with being a woman is that frankly a lot of women simply judge her harshly.
Oh but she would be far better than the current idjits.
This oil thing is so asinine. Heck, they could open up the drilling here for short-term needs and jobs, and create a set-aside fund from the lease money to go directly into alternative energy research and development.
I’ve long said we need a “manhattan project” type effort there. Lock a bunch of damn SCIENTISTS (not “green-energy” blabbering mouthpieces, but real scientists) in a New Mexico lab somewhere for a couple of years and tell them “solve it.”
I’m all for nuclear, too, if we could come up with a better waste process. Of course I grew up right next door to the Savannah River Site, aka “the bomb plant”, so am not freaked out by nukes.
We all grew up normal, with the requisite fingers and toes, despite our fathers and cousins and brothers all working with nuclear materials, and that was with the OLD technology. The scare tactics over nuclear power are ridiculous. Coal mining has killed, maimed, and harmed more people than nuclear power ever has.
I don’t get the freakish fear about nuclear energy. Most of France’s energy is nuclear, and so is Japan and most of the waste is recycled. Apparently all of that nuclear technology has not resulted in massive amounts of waste, and even that is rather manageable.
I endorse the All of the Above approach. Do whatever we need to do to secure energy independence.
My issue with the ex governor is electability, nothing more. She’s quite competent when she talks about energy-related issues. To run a credible presidential campaign, she would have to hit the books, as one pundit said, to be able to discuss other issues with the same authority and aplomb. At present she is simply not electable, and it would take serious work to make her electable by 2012.
I think her electability is seriously impaired, especially for 2012. The upside for her though is that she is young and has a very passionate following. She could run in 20 years and still be only in her 60’s. The key challenge will be how she retools her issue between now and 2016 or 2020.
I don’t agree elderj. With the way things are going who knows what 2012 will look like. Remember, we never saw Obama coming and that turned out to be detrimental.
I think that Sarah should sit 2012 out and become Secretary of Energy.