Henry Waxman is the buffoon of the week for his rather testy exchange to inquiries on the killing of the Keystone Pipeline Project by the Obama Administration. As you will see, he uses a typical lefty response to a challenge: pivot, distract, insult/accuse. Dodge the real heart of the matter but putting your opposition on defense as a result of a ridiculous accusation. Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) fit this model perfectly in his recent exchange with Representative Ed Whitfield (R-KY):
Sadly, the rejection of the pipeline won’t even do much to protect the environment:
“Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global-warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.”
It will though, destroy potential jobs and hurt the economy in many different ways:
“Now consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.
“Finally, Obama’s decision forgoes all the project’s jobs. There’s some dispute over the magnitude. Project sponsor TransCanada claims 20,000, split between construction (13,000) and manufacturing (7,000) of everything from pumps to control equipment. Apparently, this refers to “job years,” meaning one job for one year. If so, the actual number of jobs would be about half that spread over two years. Whatever the figure, it’s in the thousands and thus important in a country hungering for work. And Keystone XL is precisely the sort of infrastructure project that Obama claims to favor.”
As demonstrated by Henry Waxman, this once again shows that the Obama Administration isn’t serious about helping the economy. They are more concerned with playing political games and demonizing the Koch brothers. Even if they would benefit from the Keystone Pipeline what does that matter? Is the Obama Administration saying that he is willing to kill tens of thousands of jobs and fail to decrease our dependency on foreign oil in order to settle a political score? Are we back to pay-to-play Chicago politics?
There may be some truth to that. You know who benefits greatly from the killing of the Keystone Pipeline? Obama supporter and fundraiser Warren Buffett. He was the guy whose secretary sat in the president’s box in the recent State of the Union address. Maybe Congress should drag him in to testify. One of his companies that he owns, Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC, stands to gain a lot of business from transporting oil via rail if no pipeline exists.
Just another example of hypocrisy from the Obama Administration.
