WH Spokesman Jay Carney: Obama Didn't Nix the XL, It was Those Mean Republicans Who Did It

Your tax dollars pay for this smarmy little fellow to lie to you.

Jake Tapper: “How can you say that you have an all the above on approach if the President turned down the Keystone pipeline? And you blame the Republicans for making it political.”

Carney: “But the President didn’t turn down the Keystone pipeline. There was a process in place, with long precedent, run out of the State Department because of the issue of the pipeline crossing an international boundary, that required an amount of time for proper for review after an alternate route was deemed necessary through Nebraska at the request of the Republican Governor of Nebraska and other stakeholders in Nebraska and the region that needed to play out, to be done appropriately. You can’t review and approve a pipeline, the route for which doesn’t even exist.

“The Republicans were the ones who unfortunately decided because they were looking for scalps, I guess, or wins in a situation where they somehow found themselves on the wrong side of cutting taxes for 160 million Americans last December. They decided to play politics with this decision and attack the payroll tax cut extension. Even though it was made clear by the State Department that doing so would make it impossible for them to conduct the review responsibly, they did it anyway knowing what the result would be.”

That must be why the Republicans keep packing XL approval into other bills. To kill it. That must be why they keep calling Obama out about those 20,000 jobs the XL would have created. To kill them, too. That must be why the Republicans keep blaming the lost XL capacity as one of the reasons gas prices are so high. To blame themselves for that.

Let’s go over the facts again. The XL was studied for more than three years and found to be environmentally sound, with some question about routing it around a Nebraska aquifer. President Obama, answering to Julia Louis-Dreyfus and other Hollywood liberals and the Luddite green meanies, tried kicking the approval out past the 2012 election to keep from having to decide between the unions, which support the pipeline because of the jobs it would create, and the Luddite left, which doesn’t support it because they don’t want us using any fuel of which they disapprove, anytime, anywhere. That decision to delay the decision effectively killed the pipeline right there. But the Republicans tried to force Obama’s hand by packing a 60-day deadline into another bill. And then Obama’s State Department scuttled the pipeline outright, and Canada promptly made a deal with China. To all that history, which is recent and can be Googled, Carney thumbs his nose and claims a set of facts which, in fact, don’t exist. That’s what they call a “lie,” and not even a particularly good one.

By the way, you know who is known as the “father of lies“? Just sayin’.