Obama's Keystone XL Punt

One of the hardest to bear of the many liberal hypocrisies is the idea that liberals are trying to save the environment.  If only they were!

In reality, liberals are like Siddhartha Gautama, the young Indian princeling and upper-class ascetic, who decided to dump wifey and kids and princely burdens for a life of contemplation and enlightenment.  They are ramming their religion down our throats, the religion of upper-class asceticism.  It goes something like this.  We are well-to-do educated chappies, and we have found that getting more stuff doesn't make us happy.  So we have decided that you chaps shouldn't have any more stuff either.

President Obama is the leader of the liberal upper-class ascetics in America and his job is to make sure that the great unwashed don't get out of hand and build stuff to create jobs and prosperity.  That would disturb the liberal vision of everyone living simply so others could simply live.  So he punted on second down on the Keystone XL pipeline that's designed to get oil from Alberta to the gulf state refineries in the US.  Apparently the pipeline is routed through the Nebraska sand hills and a pipeline rupture might harm sensitive aquifers.  Wouldn't want to upset lefty enviros right before the presidential election.

According to liberals, we need regulation so that we can do the science on technical projects.  But of course, in reality the regulation serves as a perfect vehicle for liberals to legislate their morality on the rest of us.  The result is a complete mess in the energy industry and crony green capitalism as entrepreneurs get the message and massage the liberal pols in a pay for play deal that would make the old robber barons blanch.

The same thing applies everywhere that liberals are active.  There's education, a complete mess, that is generating high-school graduates that can't write and college graduates that can't get jobs.  Liberals want government-dominated health care, as if it isn't government power that has screwed up health care this half century and more.

Rich Lowry writes about the comical side of all this.  President Obama tells us that we don't do the big things any more, like build the Golden Gate Bridge.  We have become lazy and soft in recent decades, apparently.  If only.

If we don't build Golden Gate XL bridges, it is because liberals are standing in the courthouse door.  If we are lazy and soft it is because liberals have forced a welfare state on us that has become springtime for freeloaders.  If we have an energy problem it is because anti-science liberals have prevented common-sense energy development in favor of pie-in-the-sky green energy.  If we have an entitlement problem it is because liberals refuse to sign on to a solution.  They would rather demagogue about "saving Medicare as we know it" and win the next election.

Every political dynasty begins in vigor and reform.  Every political dynasty ends up frozen in fear and unable to do the simple necessary things to get things done.  Unfortunately, we have not yet reached the  end-game of dynastic liberalism. Liberals are still powerful enough to stop change and reform, but the American people aren't yet angry enough to sweep them aside onto the ash-heap of history.