There has been, you will have noticed, an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Following a fatal platform fire, a ruptured well is spewing out crude at a depth of over 30,000 feet – and it’s making rather a large mess. It could be thought that this would silence the right wing “drill, baby, drill” crowd, but such a thought would be wrong.
First out of the traps, back on May 17, was the odious Rush Limbaugh, who asserted that drilling in deep water areas was the fault of environmentalist “wackos”. Limbaugh’s reasoning was that there was plenty of oil “practically begging” to be extracted closer to shore – except there isn’t. The prospects for lucrative extraction in deeper water are that much better.
Then, this week, the same line has been taken by former Alaska Governor – yes, it’s her again – Sarah Palin, in a Facebook note. Palin baselessly talks, as does Limbaugh, of these drilling areas close to shore, without telling her readers that permits to drill in those areas have also been given recently. It’s just that the opportunities further offshore are more appealing.
Palin bangs on about the USA becoming beholden to “foreign companies” and that this will “outsource jobs”, somehow managing to forget that she is married to a bloke who has more than ten years’ service with, er, BP – the company involved in the spill. She accuses environmentalists of “protests and lawsuits and lies”, although does not feel the need to cite one.
Along with Palin’s assertions have come the usual supporting suspects, notably Rupe’s new troops at the increasingly downmarket Wall Street Journal, and his established body of slanted “journalism” at Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse).
All of this talk of “locking up” shallow water drilling was then disproved by US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who confirmed in a Washington Post article that there had been “no moratorium” on shallow water drilling.
So it looks rather like the usual right wing suspects are displaying their usual level of veracity: very little.
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Digressing slightly, Palin needs to realise that being beholden to American companies - IT services being an example - has led to much outsourcing of jobs. HP/EDS and IBM have been doing it wholesale for the last ten years, and it's mostly only been restrained because of contract stipulations by customers (typically government agencies).
No such constraints, of course, apply to manufacturing, even though the brands in question remain "American".
And, of course, "outsourcing" is being confused with "offshoring", which is what Sarah Palin was really referring to (as was I).
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