Keystone XL doesn't mean anything anymore. So why does it mean everything?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/18/keystone-xl-pipeline-vote-republicans-democrats

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Congratulations, America. Congress is finally going to vote to approve you a Keystone XL pipeline of your very own, and they might even succeed. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu – “a Democrat” in the same sense that David Gilmour’s 53 minutes of instrumental jams is “a Pink Floyd album” – told reporters on Monday that she had 60 votes to finally get the project through the Senate. (Though, Jay Rockefeller, of the oil Rockefellers, threw some cold crude on her math on Monday night.)

After three years of angry campaigns against it, many Democrats are seemingly ready to relent, while Republicans can bring you ... well, that isn’t clear. Like a bitter screaming match between an old married couple, the Keystone fight has always seemed to have nothing to do with the physically real and everything to do with the unholy process. The Democrats’ position has been an incoherent muddle, and the Republican way – like so many other things about their politics – is about you not having the right to say no.

You can be forgiven for not remembering what Keystone actually does at this point, since the entire dispute has long since passed fully into metonymy for both sides. The left sees this as another ugly entry in the “Oil!” category, and the right is still pissed about environmentalists hindering progress over that spotted owl thing 25 years ago. So to be on the safe side, let’s set the record straight about what Keystone XL is:

And that’s it, really. A few fossil fuel companies want to spend less money while making even more money, and environmentalists want to curb our dependency on fossil fuels by not encouraging the development of less efficient oil that will pump more crap into the air.

The hippies also don’t want us to run a tube full of toxic garbage across America’s largest underground water supply, and they aren’t convinced that it’s safe – despite supporters who note that the pipeline has “16,000 data points updated every five seconds” to detect leaks, and, come on, would the fossil fuels industry grossly overstate their own efficacy in environmental protection? (It’s not like their peers have learned that paying fines is much cheaper than compliance or anything. Remember when a Koch brothers’ “explosion of a defective pipeline ... incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers”? Good times. Cost-optimal times.)

There are two more things to bear in mind. One, the Keystone XL pipeline won’t lower your gas prices and may instead raise them slightly in the Midwest. Two, on the “where are the jobs where are they” front: the State Department estimates that Keystone will create 3,900 temporary construction jobs, with permanent new jobs clocking in at 35. Although circumstances can always change! Working for Fema is a job.

So why the fevered rush? How is it that so much ink has been spilled and so many words have been yelled over something that gets Americans so little? How did such a nothingburger become so vital?

Because polls show that Keystone XL has overwhelming support, even among Americans who consider themselves environmentally conscious. If you’re in Congress, this is a great reason to vote for something. Who doesn’t like it when a lot of people agree with you? The only problem is that a lot of people are morons and that the whole elitist schtick of creating a republic was to protect the democratic process from morons.

For instance, 10 years after 9/11, 46% of respondents to a University of Maryland poll thought Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaida, while 38% believed substantial evidence had been discovered proving Saddam worked closely with the group. It’s probably a safe bet that 5% of respondents would have told you that the Piltdown Man was real (and only 10% would’ve known what you were talking about).

Polls about Keystone XL would only be surprising if you couldn’t find lots of supporters after three years of Fox News falsely claiming that it will lower gas prices and create 42,000 permanent new jobs. We don’t know how poll respondents arrived at their much-trumpeted support; the poll didn’t come with clarifying questions like, “Is the president a half-breed muslin?” or, “Did One Direction do Benghazi?” Maybe if people had been asked, “Do you support the Keystone XL pipeline, which will not lower your gas prices and will create fewer permanent jobs than building a Gap Factory Outlet Store,” the people in support would have been four. Not percent, just four.

Still, Mary Landrieu thinks that she might have the votes, and she very nearly does because the Democrats want to appear to be loyal environmentalists to please their base, while seeming like anything but environmentalists to anyone else. They are utterly terrified of being stereotyped based on the things they actually claim to believe, so the poll numbers in support of Keystone XL are comforting. More importantly, Obama gives them cover: over a dozen Democrats who feel vulnerable to anti-energy ads in their next election could vote for the bill but still leave the senate one vote shy of what would be need to overcome Obama’s veto.

And yet, says John Boehner, if the president vetoes the bill, “It would be the equivalent of calling the American people stupid.”

For the GOP, the motivation behind their pro-Keystone stance could be as simplistic as “Drill, baby, drill” even though it’s not American oil; it won’t be sucked up by an American oil company; the American construction jobs aren’t going to last forever; and the American refineries are getting work anyway. But, to quote a great patriot, not one step back: if Keystone can be stopped, then what next? A coal mine? A new fracking assembly pumping polychlorinated biphenyls and Surge soda into the ground? A golf cart that runs on burning old wet stacks of newspaper?

Or ... it could be something else. Sitting through all 88 GOP primary debates in the 2012 campaign and almost ever major GOP speech of that election, it was easy to see anger. There was rage at socialism, at weakness abroad, at “apologizing for America”. But the Keystone outrage I saw then has slowly turned into an epic three-year snit, a thundering foot-stamping of how dare they, yet another manifestation of this vague and ahistorical notion that a suspension of the GOP wish list represents an abrogation of democracy itself. In its way, it’s the obverse of the passage of Obamacare: Congressional majority or no, that had no right to become law because we forbade it. It was our right – indeed, it is our platform – to say no. And that’s a right that nobody else gets.

So it’s time. Let’s build that Gap Outlet.