A picture is worth a thousand words — and a thousand miles of existing commercial pipelines. Why is the Keystone XL pipeline vexing our poor overtaxed — and over taxing — president’s brain so much at Christmastime? At Power Line, Steve Hayward writes:

Now, this came to mind in connection with a graphic of another campaign and potential rout, this time of Emperor Napoleon’s President Obama’s stubborn opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.  I had looked at official Department of Energy sources some months ago looking for maps of existing pipelines in the U.S., and although I found  a few, I discovered that after 9/11, detailed pipeline maps, at least from U.S. government sources, were now hard to come by.  But courtesy PennWell, and flagged for us by SmallDeadAnimals and Glenn Reynolds, behold the graphic that ought to cause Obama to retreat before his poll numbers on this issue track the temperature trend of Napoleon’s Grand Armee:

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John Mauldin (registration required), offers several more are different levels of detail, displayed here.  The first is just natural gas pipelines, about which Mauldin comments: “To say it looks worse than your grandmother’s varicose veins is no exaggeration. It is hard to find a state that does not have a natural gas pipeline. Without them the US would simply come to a grinding halt.”

In other words: wedge issues — they’re not just for Democrats anymore.