Remember this? As the photo above will helpfully remind you, Hillary tried one of the more absurd dodges of her life back in July when she said she wouldn't reveal her position on the Keystone XL pipeline until she became president. The faces of her purported fans furled in disgust and confusion as Hillary tried this one on for size: "I am not going to second guess (Obama) because I was in a position to set this in motion. I want to wait and see what he and Secretary Kerry decide."
So because she "set this in motion" as Secretary of State, meaning the first four years of foot-dragging in the review process were under her watch, she felt she had a special responsibility to say nothing. I suppose that would include saying nothing about why, after four years, she couldn't make a decision and handed it off to Kerry to do more foot-dragging.
We know the answer to all this, of course. The Democrats have no substantive justification for denying Keystone XL, but they know perfectly well that their environmentalist base will go insane if it's approved. So they've spent seven years doing nothing, and Hillary hoped she could go through her entire campaign saying nothing.
But as Rob told you yesterday, her polls numbers are terrible and the once-"inevitable" nominee now finds herself in a serious three-way race with an avowed socialist and a guy who's not even running. So two months later, with nothing having changed on the issue and with Obama and Kerry having announced no decision whatsoever, Hillary suddenly knows her position and finds it imperative that she tell us what it is:
Hillary Clinton settled the biggest non-mystery of the presidential campaign on Tuesday by formally coming out against the Keystone XL pipeline. The Democratic candidate, and front-runner at least for now, had played coy for months on the years-old issue, but everyone knew she wasn't going to buck the donor base of the Democratic left.
Her reasoning is still worth noting. "I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone pipeline as what I believe it is--a distraction from important work we have to do on climate change," she told a community forum in Des Moines, Iowa. "And unfortunately from my perspective, one that interferes with our ability to move forward with all the other issues."
The real reason Hillary's poll numbers are tanking is that she's a liar and is completely inept with respect to every quality one might need to be an effective president
That is some load of crap, and it's probably not worth trying to compare it to other Hillary loads of crap because going through all the data would take months. But here's what she really means: The green lobby hates Keystone XL with the passion of a thousand white hot suns because it's a big, audacious initiative of the oil industry, and no matter the project's merits, they'll never stop shrieking until the federal government kills it. So it's a "distraction" only in a political sense, and of course, that's the only sense that means anything to Hillary Clinton.
When Democrats talk about the "important work we have to do on climate change," the Journal's piece above also nicely translates that phrase as "government control over energy production in the name of climate change." That's what it really comes down to for Democrats, who only use "climate change" as an excuse to pursue their real agenda of putting just about everything in America under political control at the federal level - thus making as many people as possible dependent on their good graces.
People on the inside always assumed this was Hillary's position, but she saw herself slipping in the polls and hoped that by going public with it, she could win back some of those who have either fallen in love with Bernie Sanders or who are champing at the bit to jump ship to Joe Biden.
The real reason Hillary's poll numbers are tanking is that she's a liar and is completely inept with respect to every quality one might need to be an effective president. Her very pursuit of the presidency is turning people off because she is so clearly ill-suited for it, yet so doggedly determined to attain it regardless. Suddenly discovering a position on an issue where previously she claimed to have none is not going to change that at all. In fact, it's further evidence of it. And her biggest problem is that she can't stop acting like this because no matter how many new personas she attempts to present, she can't get away from her biggest problem:
The fact that she is Hillary Clinton.
Remember this? As the photo above will helpfully remind you, Hillary tried one of the more absurd dodges of her life back in July when she said she wouldn't reveal her position on the Keystone XL pipeline until she became president. The faces of her purported fans furled in disgust and confusion as Hillary tried this one on for size: "I am not going to second guess (Obama) because I was in a position to set this in motion. I want to wait and see what he and Secretary Kerry decide."
So because she "set this in motion" as Secretary of State, meaning the first four years of foot-dragging in the review process were under her watch, she felt she had a special responsibility to say nothing. I suppose that would include saying nothing about why, after four years, she couldn't make a decision and handed it off to Kerry to do more foot-dragging.
