Sarah Palin Claims that She Knows How to Fix the BP Oil Leak

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Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:01 pm

Quick call the Dutch

Sarah Palin turned up on The O’Reilly Factor tonight and claimed that she knows how to stop the Gulf oil leak. Palin claimed that we should rely on foreign countries to fix the oil leak, “What the federal government should have done was accept the assistance of foreign countries, of entrepreneurial Americans who have solutions…who can’t even get a phone call returned.”

Here is the video courtesy of Media Matters:

O’Reilly asked Palin how she would stop the leak, and she said, “What the federal government should have done was accept the assistance of foreign countries, of entrepreneurial Americans who have solutions that they wanted presented they can’t even get a phone call returned. The Dutch they are known and the Norwegians, they are known for dikes and for cleaning up water and for dealing with spills. They offered to help and yet no they too, with the proverbial can’t even get a phone call back. That is what the Norwegians are telling us, and what the Dutch are telling us, and then the entrepreneurial Americans, the company in Maine that has the boom and the absorbents. Those companies that are waiting for the Obama administration, eight weeks later for the regulators to come in and say ok, we’ll purchase from you now. We’ll do all that we can, that’s where some of the frustration is. Now we saw the same thing with Katrina didn’t we? I’m not going to point fingers and make this a partisan issue at all, point finger at different administrations.”

Palin claimed that the priorities of our national government are wrong and we should be spending more money on national security and stop interfering with the private sector. (It is necessary to point out here that it was a relaxation of regulations by the Bush administration, that allowed BP, a private sector company, to operate with less government interference a.k.a. regulation which led to the leak). She also claimed that she made Alaska safer and spent 75% of her time on oversight of the oil companies, but the board that she created didn’t work, and Palin is not telling the truth.

According to Richard A. Feinberg at The Oil Patch, “While Palin was barnstorming in the Lower-48, back in Alaska reality was colliding with her oft-repeated claims that, as governor, she “promised to protect the environment – and we did,” and that Alaska demonstrates that “it is possible to be both pro-environment and pro-resource development.” But during the six weeks between the Nov. 17 release of Palin’s book and the end of the year, a somber, petroleum-stained picture of Alaska was emerging. Largely overlooked by the headlines and celebrity gossip that swirled around the former governor, the Alaska North Slope petroleum system spawned, in rapid succession, no less than five separate spills.” In fact, it was recommended that the state abandon her panel and start over again.

If we are to understand this, Palin’s big solution is to call the Dutch because they are good at cleaning up water leaks, and then we should let a Maine company whose booms have failed quality control tests into the Gulf to clean up the mess, and on top of all this it turns out that Palin’s claims of being a protector of the environment are completely false. The really scary part is that despite all of this, she still has a legitimate chance to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, my how far the Party of Lincoln has fallen.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association

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