Obama Builds Pipeline to Nowhere

Obama Builds Pipeline to Nowhere
By John Ransom
3/31/2011

After another of Obama’s ringing calls to inaction, confusion and delay, it should come as no surprise that people are even less sure now about the president’s energy policy than they were before he opened his mouth at Georgetown University on Wednesday and delivered another “landmark” speech.

We’ve come to expect that when B.O. talks about any policy, uncertainty follows.

Many of his allies even feel betrayed.

Welcome aboard, I say: He is who we said he was.

Today’s major energy speech by the president was long on backdrop and short on specifics, a hallmark we've come to expect in an Obama landmark speech.

All he needed were the Styrofoam Grecian pillars.

“If I am President,” Obama told us in 2008, “I will immediately direct the full resources of the federal government and the full energy of the private sector to a single, overarching goal — in ten years, we will eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela. “

This is a president who suffers from a kind of attention-deficit disorder, apparently. He hasn’t used the full resources of the federal government to do anything but print money.

He’s been president for two years, and when it has come to producing more domestic energy and importing less, Obama has been noticeably less than energetic himself. When he talks about using abundant American resources like natural gas, we realize, sadly, that the only gas that will likely fill a pipeline that he proposes is the hot air from his mouth.

In places like Alaska, they share the uncertainty that all of us feel.

And the frustration.

“The president didn't single out Alaska's proposed pipeline specifically when he spoke about developing the nation's domestic natural gas resources,” writes the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) about the speech, somewhat forlornly, “but [Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska] said he's been in ‘constant conversation’ with the White House about the project.”

The White House, Begich will find, is really good at that “constant conversation” part of the job.

But every once in a while the White House should probably be quiet and let the grown-ups finish talking.

Obama bragged when he was running for president that he’d put “one million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” So far, he hasn’t even put one on the road.

No one has. No such car exists. It's kind of a unicorn of the automotive world.

Because that's what we're stuck with as policy these days: wishful thinking. Maybe leprechauns will come solve our problems.

"Not being negative about Alaska is a positive," Begich reasoned in the ADN.

That’s not exactly a winning motto for any state, or for any energy policy. It might be the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard a sitting senator say, even one from Alaska.

Say what you will but “Drill, baby, drill,” sounds an awful lot better.

I don’t follow college basketball but I hear that the president’s NCAA brackets are doing really well- I’m not making this up.

I wish he was as resourceful in coming up with an energy policy. Then he, Charlie Sheen and LeBron could unveil it live at the Chicago Theatre.

They could have it televised by ESPN.

They could call it “Winning the Future with a Pipeline to Nowhere.”

That is, if the Miami Heat haven’t already trademarked the term.