...For a while, President Blameless could shirk responsibility by pointing fingers at his predecessor. That got old, though I can’t say in a hurry. As late as last July, the White House sought to prove that Dallas resident George W. Bush was still responsible for all the nation’s budget troubles. Atlantic magazine blogger Megan McArdle deliciously characterized this lame attempt at evading responsibility as “The duck starts here.”
Mr. Obama’s roster of the blameworthy is quite eclectic: The Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring uprisings, the European debt crisis and “bad luck” were fingered as causes of the bad economy in a speech last summer. Of course, Mr. Obama was responsible solely for fanciful successes. “We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” the president remarked before ceding the stage to the tooth fairy.
When the president, in a sop to his environmental base, killed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have created thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens and brought us fuel from a friendly nation, that, too, was cast as the fault of the Republicans: They had had the audacity to try to force the president to make a timely decision.
In announcing that he was scrapping the pipeline, the president said the decision was “not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline” but on the “arbitrary nature of a deadline” Republicans had given him. He can’t possibly decide, at least until after this November.
When China gets the pipeline, you can bet your bottom dollar (assuming you still have a bottom dollar by then) that Mr. Obama will blame somebody else...
Read on right here.
