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On his radio show today, Glenn Beck came up with a solution to the Gulf oil spill. He thinks that Sarah Palin should use her oil industry expertise hold an oil spill summit where she and her team would come up with ideas fix the leak. Beck said that Palin has, “the connections and the knowledge to put a team together and say Mr. President, this is what we do.”

Here is the audio courtesy of Media Matters:

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Beck said, “If I were Sarah Palin, and I’m not…I would be down in the Gulf and I would be meeting with the heads of Shell and the heads of Exxon. I would be meeting with all of them, and I would be meeting with all of the engineers. I would be having my own summit down there, and I would develop policy, and say this is what we need to do. Sarah has the weight behind her. She understands the oil industry. She can get these people together, and she can get the engineers together, because her husband is an oil rigger. They have the connections and the knowledge to put a team together and say Mr. President, this is what we do.”

Beck’s claim is based on the myth that Sarah Palin is a well connected oil expert, but as she has proven time and time again, she knows nothing about the oil industry. Recently, when she was on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly asked her for a solution, and she said we should call the Dutch, because they are good at fixing leaks. In the same interview she stressed her believe that oil drilled for in the US could be outsourced. Palin’s oil expertise also led her to tell Gulf residents to pray for a solution.

Sarah Palin has two areas of expertise as it relates to the oil industry. The first is the ability to impose socialistic taxes, like her windfall tax when she was governor, in order to redistribute wealth, and send the oil companies fleeing out of Alaska. The second area is her uncanny ability to take the oil industry’s money.

Speaking of Todd Palin, he was so much more than a rigger for BP. Released emails reveal that while an employee of BP, he was, “involved in a judicial appointment, monitored contract negotiations with public employee unions, received background checks on a corporate CEO, added his approval or disapproval to state board appointments and passed financial information marked “confidential” from his oil company employer to a state attorney.”

It would appear that from the information released, Todd Palin was eyeballs deep in a conflict of interest, “The 243 still-secret e-mails between Todd Palin and senior officials reach into countless areas of state government and politics: potential board appointees, constituent complaints, use of the state jet, oil and gas production, marine regulation, gas pipeline bids, postsecondary education, wildfires, native Alaskan issues, the state effort to save the Matanuska Maid dairy, budget planning, potential budget vetoes, oil shale leasing…”

Why is that Hillary Clinton was criticized in 2008 when she claimed that she had executive branch experience because she was First Lady, but Sarah Palin gets called an oil expert by the Right because her husband worked for BP? To answer Beck’s question, Sarah Palin won’t hold an oil spill summit, because she has no expertise or solutions to offer. Her expertise is a political myth that was designed by the McCain campaign to sell Palin as his running mate in 2008. Outside of her media fame Palin has no real power, because former half term governors don’t have the sway needed in order to operate as a shadow president, as Beck suggests. Most importantly, unless the oil summit was going to pay her to show up, Sarah Palin will have no interest, as she has shown time again that her true and sole motivation is the almighty dollar.