SouthernFemaleLawyer

Any drone that has ever toiled away in insurance defense or appellate work is only too familiar with the following scenario:

Partner hands you an utter shit salad of a case:  Claimant successfully sues/sued for injuries for which your client is clearly and unequivocally liable and has absolutely no serious defense in fact or in law. Partner now tells you to draft responsive pleadings/responsive appellate briefs – a task that is fraught with peril, given that if one sticks to the actual facts of the case and applies the actual law, your response is likely to incur the wrath of the judge and result in sanctions.

I was in this position approximately eleventy billion times over the course of my mini-career as an associate. After a while, you actually learn how to analyze a set of facts and law to find the tiniest snag so that you can pick it open and blow it up, conflate it into something favorable to you, and then use semantics, tone, and rhetoric to guide your reader/listener to a conclusion that you are unquestionably correct, even though the law, facts, reality, and common sense would dictate otherwise.

I actually developed some serious skills in crafting viable arguments in the face of such factual/legal paucity. And yes, I actually won a few times. More than a few. I can’t tell you how proud I was to be the Queen of Pulling It Out Of My Ass.

So believe me when I say, I know the difference between an argument grounded in reality and an argument grounded in ‘holy shit I can’t be wrong because I told the client I could win this and now I’m totally fucked and this whole argument is bullshit and I should just admit I was wrong but there is no way in hell I am going to do that so I suppose I will just bellow even louder in the hopes that people think that I *must* be right because if I weren’t I would have shut up long long ago.’

This, readers, would be the latter:

Sarah Palin: Extreme Enviros: Drill, Baby, Drill in ANWR – Now Do You Get It?

Sarah Palin’s Notes  Yesterday at 3:17pm

This is a message to extreme “environmentalists” who hypocritically protest domestic energy production offshore and onshore. There is nothing “clean and green” about your efforts. Look, here’s the deal: when you lock up our land, you outsource jobs and opportunity away from America and into foreign countries that are making us beholden to them. Some of these countries don’t like America. Some of these countries don’t care for planet earth like we do – as evidenced by our stricter environmental standards.

With your nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you’re doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You’re not preventing environmental hazards; you’re outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous.

Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country’s energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It’s catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.

We need permission to drill in safer areas, including the uninhabited arctic land of ANWR. It takes just a tiny footprint – equivalent to the size of LA’s airport – to tap America’s rich and plentiful oil and gas up north. ANWR’s drilling footprint is like a postage stamp on a football field.

But it’s not just ANWR; it’s our Petroleum Reserve, too. As Governor Sean Parnell noted today in the Wall Street Journal:

“Federal agencies are also now blocking oil development in the National Petroleum Reserve—Alaska.

Although familiar with ANWR, most Americans are less likely to know about NPR-A and how vital it is to our energy security. Given recent developments, it’s time to elevate the position this area holds in our national discourse.

NPR-A, a 23 million acre stretch of Alaska’s North Slope, was set aside by President Warren Harding in 1923 for the specific purpose of supplying our country and military with oil and gas. Since 1976 it has been administered by the Department of the Interior, and since 1980 it has been theoretically open for development. The most recent estimates indicate that it holds 12 billion barrels of oil and 73 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In addition to containing enormous hydrocarbons, NPR-A is very close to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which means that there would be relatively little additional infrastructure needed to bring this new oil to our domestic market.

But even here, progress has been stalled.”

Radical environmentalists: you are damaging the planet with your efforts to lock up safer drilling areas. There’s nothing clean and green about your misguided, nonsensical radicalism, and Americans are on to you as we question your true motives.

– Sarah Palin

Ahhh, clever work, Ms. Palin (or should I say, Nameless Peon Whose Thankless Job It Is To Manage Sarah Palin’s Facebook Page). I see you have chosen my favorite weapon – the ‘I Know You Are But What Am I?’ nunchucks.  “Extreme enviros” are actually out to destroy the environment – such delicious irony! Oooo – and the exquisite (if ubiquitous) knife in the gut accusation of being unAmerican.  “Using semantics, tone, and rhetoric to guide your reader,” indeed.

So, well played Nameless Peon Whose Thankless Job It Is To Manage Sarah Palin’s Facebook Page. And don’t worry about being out of work when Ms. Palin’s crazypants float off into the rainbow sherbet sunset of lost dreams – you have a bright future ahead of you in appellate insurance defense.

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