Keystone XL: Was That Really so Hard?: Or, the Travesty of Political Politicians

I suspect the ultimate cause of all this drama was that Transcanada wanted to maintain a perception of telling states where it was putting it's next pipeline would go as opposed to one of asking them if they could.  It's the same old story of big business ego, wanting to see itself as existing on a higher plane above the vulgarities of democracy and rights.  Thank goodness there aren't any more cases of that in the current news. 

 

 

In related news, there's been some talk about President Obama's decision to delay a decision on the pipeline being a weak-willed pander.  "You cannot alienate the environmentalists if you're the Democratic president during an election year. Of course, he made a political decision." -Howard Dean  

The correct answer to this charge is; yes, of course it is, what of it?  In our system of government it is perfectly common for the interests of the many and the ambitions of the powerful to coincide.  That's the entire point of democracy, the definition of it, and would seem to be its most obvious blessing.  Yet there's an old puritanical strain in American thought that considers proper decisions to be acts of medieval penance.  So that those choices which anger the least and please the most are automatically wrong for precisely that reason.  It is forbidden to ponder that the path of least resistance could ever be the morally correct one, because morality and ease are in eternal war against each other, and everything that everyone does is a cosmic choice between one side or the other.  A real leader makes life more poetic by deliberately choosing the path of struggle and division.  

That's what old Yankee moralism tells you, anyway.  Joshua D. Beran says, fuck that shit.  The pipeline is being moved out of the Sandhills.  We got what we wanted.  We won.  The progressive and environmentally concerned people of Nebraska won, and not just us of course.  We won by sharing our common interest with people who normally have knee-jerk self-identity reactions against anything 'liberal'.  So that Nebraska won, democracy won, the people won.  It's a good day.  Be happy.  Engage yourself in pleasure.  Have some fucking ice cream. It's November and there hasn't even been a blizzard yet.  It's all good y'all.