Matt Yglesias

All I Know Is That I Don’t Know Nothing

WP Factchecker has an interesting item. Let’s put things a bit more starkly.

During a September 11 interview with ABC News, John McCain said that Sarah Palin “knows more about energy than probably anyone in the United States of America.”

Sarah Palin, during her interview with Charlie Gibson said that Akaska producers “nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.”

That was a lie. And people in the press pointed out that it was a lie. So Palin changed her line. And she told a rally in Colorado yesterday that “My job has been to oversee nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of oil and gas.” But this is also a lie! Here’s what I found on the Energy Information Administration’s Alaska page:

Alaska produces much less than 20 percent of the nation’s oil and much, much less than 20 percent of the nation’s gas. And yet this is the person John McCain regards as the country’s foremost expert on energy issues — someone who doesn’t know how much energy her own state produces, someone who’s too arrogant and lazy to look it up, and someone with such a casual disregard for the truth that even after getting called on getting her facts wrong and changing her line she doesn’t bother changing it to something true:

But here’s a hint. According to the EIA, Alaska does have 18.5 percent of the country’s estimated oil reserves. So maybe she wants to say she oversaw almost twenty percent of that.