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So on Monday TransCanada sent a note to the secretary of state, John Kerry, politely requesting that a decision be delayed. It cited the need to wait for a ruling on a court challenge in Nebraska, one of numerous legal tactics used by opponents of the pipeline to strangle it in delays. Russ Girling, the TransCanada CEO, noted that the State Department had suspended its review during an earlier Nebraska dispute, so it seemed logical that it would do so again.

Logical, yes, but nothing about Keystone has been logical. So Obama, after diddling and dawdling for seven years, declared there’s no way he was going to be prevented from making the decision he’d been putting off almost since the day he was first elected.

“The secretary believes that, out of respect for that process and all the input that has gone into it, that it is the most appropriate thing to keep that process in place, to continue the review,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in the diplomatic equivalent of “up yours, TransCanada.”

The White House noted that the request was “unusual” and that “there’s reason to believe there may be politics at play here.”

Politics? Good heavens, no. Who could imagine there might be politics at play in a $8-billion pipeline project that has become one of the prickliest thorns to trouble relations between Ottawa and Washington in years? When Obama derided the project – noting that “the truth is that it’s Canadian oil that’s then going to go to the world market” and that “we’re not going to authorize a pipeline that benefits largely a foreign company if it can’t be shown that it is safe and if it can’t be shown that overall it would not contribute to climate change,” — he couldn’t have been playing politics, could he? Even though the State Department had already confirmed it met his criteria.