From the annals of political cynicism, this…

Senate Democrats are looking at taking a vote in the lame-duck session that starts today to force approval of TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL pipeline, a party aide said, a move that may bolster Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu’s re-election chances.

The purpose of the vote would be symbolic: To highlight Landrieu’s support for the pipeline and her influence on energy issues in Washington — a centerpiece of her campaign. A vote in favor of the pipeline may benefit Landrieu in her Dec. 6 runoff election, in which she faces Republican Representative Bill Cassidy.

Similar measures have failed to advance in the Senate this year and Democratic leaders who now run the chamber will have trouble mustering the votes for passage now. President Barack Obama could veto the measure.

The Senate Democratic aide, who requested anonymity to discuss the plans, said specific language for a proposal hadn’t been determined.

Landrieu, 58, chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, in her campaign has sought to distance herself from Obama on energy issues, including his delay in approving the pipeline.

This country fought and won World War II in less time than it’s taken Obama to consider allowing construction of that pipeline. But because Landrieu’s campaign is on life support thanks to voters not buying her dubious argument about how much stroke she has in the Senate to get things like Keystone done, now we’re going to have a symbolic vote so she can say “Hey, look – I voted for Keystone XL!”

Yes, Mary, we know you’re for Keystone XL. That and three dollars will get you coffee at Starbucks.

Does anybody else recognize that virtually everything the Democrat Party does and says is a lie intended to fool voters they think are stupid? We have the Jonathan Gruber videos about Obamacare, which by the way Landrieu has yet to comment on, we have the secret letter to Iran’s ayatollahs last month desperately trying to cut a deal on that country’s nukes the public would find abhorrent, we have Obama telling the Russians quietly, but on a hot mic, that he’d have more “flexibility” after the election to do things the voters wouldn’t put up with, there’s the rampant obfuscation to keep the voters knowing what the Obama regime was up to with Fast and Furious, Benghazi and the IRS…the list goes on and on.

Today’s Democrat Party is incapable of honest discussion with the American people. That’s why its political campaigns center around the “War on Women,” accusations of racism, scare tactics about dirty and and dirty water, bromides about “tax cuts for billionaires” and out-and-out lies about their plans to grow government, which the public repeatedly says it has had its fill of.

The deceptions and dishonor reach all the way down to the local level. For a good example, see Forest Bradley Wright, the leftist Democrat alumnus of a Soros-funded nonprofit which lobbies the Public Service Commission on behalf of rent-seeking “alternative energy” firms who switched parties to run as a Republican against Eric Skrmetta for the PSC’s 1st District. Wright, like Gruber, counted on the “stupidity of the American voter” to defraud the electorate into thinking the R next to his name meant he is a conservative. If he had any honor he would have stood by the fact he’s a lifelong Democrat and argued the issues honestly – but in this day and age if he had any honor one has to ask whether he’d been a Democrat in the first place.

Mary Landrieu needs to be blown out of office not so much because she’s a terrible senator – she is – but because her party is an illegitimate, dishonorable and destructive force in American politics. It needs to be reduced to the status of a minor political party in this country.

Once that’s done we can go to work on reforming the GOP, which has problems aplenty in its own right. But making the country safe for constitutional government first involves inflicting punishment on those who oppose it utterly, if clandestinely.