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This Tuesday, when President Obama delivers his State of the Union Address, we can count on it to be filled with the same platitudes, anecdotes, false promises, cooked stats and tenuous connection with reality we find in everything the man does. It will be a laundry list of progressive fantasy, couched in populist rhetoric and designed to make middle-class Americans think he has something more than the zero connection and concern for them he has.
President Obama doesn’t give a damn about the middle class, jobs, the economy or much of anything that distracts from his progressive agenda. But what do you expect from someone who shows such contempt for the nation’s pastime as to wear “mom jeans” when throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star game?
I’m kidding about “mom jeans,” of course, though only mostly. But about the contempt…not at all.
Last week President Obama went to Disney World – returning to his home country of Fantasy Land to deliver a speech about the need to boost tourism. Tourism is hurting, there’s no doubt about that. But taking a vacation is hardly a priority when you’re unemployed, and for the unemployed, Mr. Obama smacked them across the face with a dead fish.
The administration announced he would block the Keystone XL pipeline, a plan to move oil from Canada to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. The green left hates it because…well, it’s real energy rather than the “green” energy racket they love to milk for government subsidies. If it’s good for humans, you can count on these people to oppose it unless they’re lining their pockets with tax dollars or preparing to profit from forced customer base through regulation.
The pipeline would have meant jobs, good jobs, lots of them … but it seems, as Vice-President Joe Biden so artfully put it, that three-letter word that is President Obama’s No.1 priority – J-O-B-S – isn’t as much a priority as pleasing the cronies he desperately needs for his reelection.
How many jobs? Conservatives say a lot; progressives say not so many. I’m no engineer, but trenches from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico don’t dig themselves, and that pipe won’t magically appear once it’s dug – nor will it maintain itself. So, more than 100 but less than the millions who have lost jobs since President Obama took office. But creating some jobs beats creating no jobs, which is what President Obama chose when he took the side of his “green” elite friends against normal American workers.
Unions wanted the pipeline, too. They like jobs, as long as they’re union jobs. And they are an important part of the progressive brigade. But they cashed out their payoff in the so-called stimulus bill. If they want more of our money to cover their unsustainable, bloated pensions they’re going to have to wait until a second term.
The president was required by law, as part of the payroll tax agreement, to make a ruling on the pipeline by Feb. 21. He called this date “rushed and arbitrary” and said on Wednesday this is part of why he decided against the pipeline. Originally, President Obama had planned to push the decision off until sometime after Nov. 6, a date that is neither “rushed” nor “arbitrary.”
In other words, he wanted to play politics with a critical decision about America’s enemy future. He wanted to wait until after the election, so he wouldn’t anger either group of supporters, Congress forced him to pick one to offend. He went with the one who got the bigger payoff already and, therefore, would be less likely to withdraw support before the election.
So, it was in Fantasy Land this week, where he went to tout the importance of tourism, that President Obama chose to announce a decision that denies jobs to tens of thousands of Americans and compromises our energy security. Those jobs will not be “created or saved,” will not be filled by people who will take their families to Disney World this year and will likely go to China or elsewhere unless we rethink.
It’s fitting President Obama shut down Main Street USA to give his speech at Disney World. He’s been shutting down Main Streets all over the country, from day one. And he’ll continue to do it if he is re-elected. Disney went back to normal after Barack Obama left, but our country will take much longer to recover. We need to start that recovery on Jan. 20, 2013. To borrow a phrase from the president, “We can’t wait.”