Does Sarah Palin Believe in Oil?

Part One:
In which I am humiliated and later vindicated

When I was in the second grade, my teacher went around the classroom asking each student to name the materials that various objects were made from. She'd say "desk" and point to Timmy who removed his finger from his nose and wipe it on the "wood." When she got to me she said "lunchbox." To which I replied confidently, "dinosaurs!" Miss Hoffman looked at me, as though assessing whether I needed to be taken down the hall to the room where the kids made loud noises and used Play Dough instead of pencils. "Are you sure?" She asked, her eyes wide and condescending. I nodded. "Nooo," she said slowly, as all of my peers snickered. "Your lunchbox is plastic, Jessica."

If I would have had it in me as a seven-year old, I would've explained to bratty Miss Hoffman that my answer made sense, as my mother, an elementary school science teacher herself, had explained it to me: plastic is made from fossil fuel which is made naturally by the breakdown over millions of years of animal and plant matter (a.k.a. dinosaurs). I betcha I know who Miss Hoffman-- I'm sure a "Mrs." by now and a good deal heftier-- is voting for back in Wisconsin this year. (Spoiler alert: the one who talks like her, doncha know!)

Part Two:
Oil is what Dinosaurs Pooped back when People Rode Them

Sarah Palin doesn't believe in the breakdown of ancient remains because, according to her, the earth didn't exist back then. Also off the table are all of those funny-lookin' fossils with fins and thingamajiggers that eventually evolved into you, me and Biscuit. This is extremely funny (ha ha ha!), as she certainly seems to believe in their byproduct oil, which she simply adores extracting from the earth-- ahem, the chant was "Drill Baby Drill".

So Sarah, how did this oil substance get into the earth? What is it made from?
Whoa, whoa slow down there! Sarah Palin may not have an answer that will appeal to all you liberal media elites and you Washington insiders. She certainly won't have a good answer for all you crazy scientists or even anyone who has ever taken freshman biology. And come to think of it, she probably won't be able to explain it to your seven-year old either. Not even with Play Dough.

But I guess that's just how things are in Alaska. Wink!

*Thanks to my friend Pendy for the brilliant title for Part Two, and Moira for so beautifully pointing out the obvious fact that Palin doesn't believe in the fossil record and therefore, oil.

Comments

[JoeU]

How fast can oil form?
"... the rapid formation of oil and gas is not only feasible on the basis of carefully controlled laboratory experiments, but has now been shown to occur naturally under geological conditions that have been common in the past.
Significantly, these short timescales are well within those proposed by creation scientists for the generation of petroleum from organic matter in sediments laid down during Noah"s Flood."

See: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v12/i2/oil.asp
and
Noah"s Flood - Genesis 6-9
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis6-9;&version=31;

[Jessica Olien - Huffpost Blogger]

I think that oil being made from organic matter that was even BEFORE dinosaurs only furthers my point. Thanks for pointing that out though.

[realpolitic]

Thanks for a great article!

[PeepingTom]

Hm...what does Palin think of "Fossil" fuels

[realpolitic]

Palin believes in anything she can see, touch, and hear. She believes in oil because she can put it in her car and then step on the gas peddle and go. She produces fantastical ideas about dinosaurs because,,,,,, well, who knows? It would be interesting to ask her where did the oil come from if the earth is 6,000 years old!

[KillTheMessenger]

God put it there so Sarah's state can produce the majority of US energy!

[realpolitic]

Exactly!! Thanks KTM!

[Semaj51]

Actually, your response in the second grade was wrong. The oil which we are using today came from pre-dinosaurs eras.

[mjt218]

It also is likely made up of micro-organisms like algae, and coral . . . not large vertebrates like dinosaurs.

[Jason404]

You guys are being pedantic. Several orders of magnitude in size and a couple of thousand million years does not matter when we are talking about Creationists!

[wandering girl]

thanks for this - I, too, wondered if Ms Palin had a "theory" on how all that oil got down there, given her stance as a young-earther creationist. as it turns out, they reject the entire chemistry, and say that oil is "primordial ooze." in other words, it doesn't come from living creatures, it's totally different: abiotic, and uniquely created.

[AndrewInToronto]

Brilliant ! Ms Olien, when I heard that she believed that dinosaurs and humans coexisted some 6000 years ago, I had wondered too how does she come to believe that the process of decomposition which took hundreds of millions of years could be accomplished in, say, 5800 years. Even thinking of mammoths living into the Holocene period (including in what is now Alaska -- Saint Paul Island), when one finds one, it may be a carcass as in the former-Soviet tundra -- not a nice itty-bitty oil deposit. As another blogger here noted: Palintology.

[realpolitic]

Yes, I wish Biden would have used that idea in the debate!