When President Obama put the kibosh on the Keystone Pipeline, environmentalist Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, “The pipeline was rejected for all the right reasons. President Obama put the health and safety of the American people and our air, lands and water–our national interest–above the interests of the oil industry.” That was false when she said it, for Obama hadn’t really put our air, land, or water on a pedestal. Rather, he simply cowed down to environmental activists (like Beinecke) who wanted him to do so in a bid to appeal once more to the far left in his party, and to subsequently lock in more votes for November 2012. In so doing, he rejected a pipeline that not only would have created thousands of jobs, but would have brought an untold amount of crude to the Gulf of Mexico for America’s refiners to use to make gasoline and other fuels.
And as the fruit of this asinine decision is born out at the gas pump, where gas is already over $3.50 a gallon and headed to $5 by summer’s end, every would-be GOP Presidential candidate should be reminding voters: “This is Obama’s hope and change–$5 a gallon gas must have been what he had in mind when said he was going to ‘fundamentally change America.'”
Let’s face it folks, the gas prices are a misery index in and of themselves. And Obama knows it, so he’s trying to spin high gas prices as proof the economy is recovering (as if high gas prices means our economy has corrected itself). If that’s true, maybe the high healthcare prices Obama used to justify the need for Obamacare were really just proof that our healthcare system was already righting its own ship?
The bottom line: Obama is an anti-capitalist and an archetypical leftist.
As such, nothing makes him happier than to teach America a lesson: to let Americans get a taste of what other nation’s pay for their gasoline, and perhaps even to force us to trade our SUVs for little plastic cars that run off batteries. This is the message Santorum, Romney, and Gingrich need to be hammering home every time someone sticks a microphone in their faces.
Gasoline was approximately $1.84 a gallon when Obama entered office, its price has risen 83% on his watch. If he believes such an increase in per-gallon price is the answer, Americans deserve a new question. It’s time to drill here, drill now. And it’s time to build the pipeline.
Until then, Obama’s rejection of the pipeline is the gift that keeps on giving for would-be GOP presidential candidates who want to distinguish their energy policy from that of our current occupant in the White House. We desperately need a president who puts our energy needs above the delusional demands of the environmentalists.
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