The Keystone XL Pipeline and more lies

A move is afoot in Congress to force approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline in the event that president Obama does not approve the permit for the project by the due date in late February. Obama tried to delay the decision until after the election since he wanted to avoid angering either the labor unions who support the project and the tens of thousands of jobs it would create or the strident environmentalists who see any project promoting fossil fuels as bad. Obama was forced to make the decision by the end of February as part of the deal that extended the payroll tax cuts for two months.

Tha amazing thing to me is not that Republicans in Congress wants to get the pipeline built or that Obama prefers to delay the pipeline and its jobs. What I find extraordinary is the excuse that the Democrats are using for the delay: the need for further environmental review. Here is what one prominent Democrat, Senator Leahy of Vermont, had to say, ""Short-cutting U.S. review of an inherently dirty tar sands project is bad enough. Smothering the review process altogether would compound the folly and divert us from better, cleaner, renewable energy solutions."

There has already been approximately four years of environmental review on this pipeline project. The agency doing the review completed its work about six months ago. At that time, Obama decided to "consider" alternative routes for the pipeline in order to delay the decision until after the election. In other words, aside from phony reviews needed to justify delaying the decision until after the election, all of the review has been completed. No one is short-cutting any actual review. Everything that the Democrats are talking about here is completely phony, a masquerade designed to avoid going ahead with the pipeline and its tens of thousands of jobs.

Why must they lie? Can't America have a president who tells the truth?