The obAMATEUR is at it again.   The least ObAMATEUR and his administration could do is be straight with the American people.  When it comes to the decision to kill the Keystone pipeline, it had nothing to do with the reasons they cited and everything to do with Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.  Why can’t he just say that the radical environmentalist vote is more important than 20,000 American jobs and a path toward energy independence?

Instead, what does ObAMATEUR do?  He has the gall to kill the pipeline and then blame the Republicans!

Obama says that the reason he had to kill the pipeline is because the Republicans imposed an “arbitrary” deadline for him to make a decision.  Here was Obama’s statement …

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people.  I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision.”

Gathering the necessary information to approve the project?  The State Department has been reviewing this Keystone pipeline since 2008!  I’m told that even by federal standards, four years is a long time for a project like this to be in limbo.  As one Senator pointed out, “The Obama administration complains about a 60-day deadline, but in reality it has now had 1,217 days to make a decision.”

So that puts this asinine “arbitrary deadline” argument to bed.  Now on to the next one … its environmental impact.  Chief dog washer Jay Carney wants you to believe that if the pipeline were built, it could affect “the air that our children breathe” and the water they drink.  Seriously!

Jay Carney: [It] would severely hamper their ability to review an alternate route and a new pipeline route in the proper way, a way that has long been established by precedent and that would take into consideration all the criteria that are so important in decisions like this. Economic impact, national security impact, environmental impact, the effect on the water that our children breathe — rather, the water our children drink and the air that they breathe.

This is what you would call a bunch of politi-scare horsesqueeze.  TransCanada, the company looking to build the pipeline, has spent a full three years and $1.9 billion studying the environmental impact of this project.  The State Department itself has already done an entire Environmental Impact Statement.  Why they need another one is beyond me.

At one point, environmentalists complained that the pipeline would threaten the Ogallala Aquifer.  Researchers at the Conservation and Survey Division of the University of Nebraska have been studying this one stinking aquifer for 40 years.  Even they determined that “the pipeline would pose a minimal risk to the Ogallala aquifer.”  But the environmentalists bitched and moaned and so the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality came up with a new route for the pipeline.  But that didn’t matter.  These environmentalists didn’t really care about the Ogallala Aquifer, they just cared about killing the pipeline altogether.  So they continued to push.

Meanwhile, Obama’s own jobs council on Tuesday said that the administration needs an “all-in approach” to energy policy, including oil and gas drilling and projects like the Keystone pipeline.  The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness writes, “[W]e should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands.”

Instead, ObAMATEUR is insistent that jobless benefits and temporary payroll tax cuts will do more for jobs in this nation than actual jobs.  Back in December while battling over the extension of the payroll tax cut, ObAMATEUR said: “However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline,” he said, “they’re going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance.”  The point, ObAMATEUR, is that you would rather have people on the government dole (keep the poor, poor) than allow them to work for a paycheck.  This ensures growing the dependent class and creating and keeping more Democrat voters in November.

Another lie perpetuated by the obAMATEUR and his fellow Democrat minions and looters is that the 1700 mile pipeline will in all likelihood not create the 22,000 jobs projected.   But, in another project in San Francisco they tout a 1.7 mile extension of the subway to create 43,000 jobs (is that with the additional unemployment benefits?).  The lies from the left keep growing and growing.

With much fanfare early in his administration, this “leader” appointed a jobs council.  This panel recommended that the rookie Executive support “policies that facilitate the safe, thoughtful and timely development of pipeline, transmission and distribution projects.”  Further, the jobs council said that failure to promote these facilities would “stall the engine that could become a prime driver of U.S. jobs and growth in the decades ahead.”

The result is that obAMATEUR ignored his much touted panel because it encouraged oil exploration and tax cuts (gasp!).  Now the drones will regurgitate the talking point that oil production is up since 2003.  Yesterday Press Secretary Jay Carney said this: “The fact of the matter is, on oil and gas production, we have higher oil production in this country in 2010 than we’ve had since 2003.”  When he made his announcement yesterday Obama said that under his administration “domestic oil and natural gas production is up.”

I heard the same thing from Juan Williams on Fox … repeating the “domestic oil production is up” line.

So … what’s the truth?  First, let’s differentiate between private and public lands. ObAMATEUR has a great deal of control over the exploration for and recovery of oil from public – government – lands.  When it comes to privately held property his degree of control (thank God) is somewhat less.  Now … KNOW THIS.  Listen up, because you won’t hear this from Juan Williams or the mainstream media.  Gas and oil production from federal lands is down by 40% over the last ten years.  The vast majority of increases in gas and oil production is taking place on private property … with North Dakota leading the way.  Also … obAMATEUR has issued the LOWEST number of offshore oil leases since 1984.  To top things off obAMATEUR just issued a 20-year ban on uranium mining on 1,000,000 acres of federal land in Arizona.

Get the picture?  It’s the private sector on private lands that is responsible for any increase in oil and gas production.  The obAMATEUR is working hard to move in the other direction.