Only fucking elitists know what “fungible” means anyway!
Published by Lisa Kansas September 21st, 2008 in A million ways to mortgage the future, My Brain Hurts, The PalinatorRepublican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin…responding to a question about how oil obtained from offshore drilling can be kept in the country instead of sold on the world market, with an answer CNN’s Wolf Blitzer characterized as “not exactly easy to understand:”*
“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. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to 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.”
(hat tip: Pandagon)
In other news, Governor Palin’s apparently good-humored response to the skewering of herself by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live was due to the fact that she watched the entire skit on “mute.” Wheee!
*Fucking liberal sexist media, they’d never expect Biden to answer that question!
**Dying to know what commodities are flagged by molecule.
I didn’t know what fungible meant, and I’m an avid reader of anything and everything I can get my hands on. So, I looked “fungible” up on dictionary.com. Here is what it says: “(esp. of goods) being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind.”
So is Palin saying that oil drilled in the USA should stay in the USA and not be traded on the open market for oil drilled in other countries? What if every country thought that way? Some countries would have more oil than they know what to do with, and some would come to a grinding halt because there is no way they could produce enough for their needs (which might not be such a bad idea after all, then maybe they’d be more willing to look at/fund alternative energy sources).
Flagging oil by molecule? Jesus, and we thought $4/gallon was expensive. Maybe they can just identify it be strings of any remaining dinosaur DNA that may be left in it? That seems more reasonable. And I commend Sarah Palin for coming up with an idea that makes searching crude oil for dino DNA seem reasonable.