When I think about President Obama’s decision not to issue a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline that would’ve created thousands (or tens of thousands) of jobs and ensured a low-cost source of energy from a staunch ally, I think that I must be dumb.

The media has been telling us for years how brilliant President Obama is, so I must be dumb. He couldn’t possibly be dumb, because Newsweek magazine told me I was dumb.

After all, this pipeline hasn’t been studied for the past three years. And President Obama didn’t want to come down with a decision until after the election because he didn’t want his decision tainted by election-year politics. And the route of the proposed pipeline is through a part of the country where we don’t have any pipelines now.

If only they’d applied for a loan guarantee from the federal government, then surely President Obama would’ve approved it. But they didn’t need a loan guarantee from the government because there are plenty of people in that pesky private sector who are perfectly willing to fund the thing because there’s money to be made. Only “green” technologies that leave the American taxpayer on the hook need federal loan guarantees.

As regular readers will know, I’m a “denier” when it comes to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmism. But even if you do pray five times a day to Al Gore’s mega-mansion in Tennessee, rejection of the pipeline makes things worse, not better. The oil Is going to be pumped out of the ground no matter what. Now, instead of traveling via pipeline to refineries in the Gulf Coast, the Canadians will build a pipeline westward and then put it on tankers headed to China. Ignore the inherently more dangerous oil tankers vs. pipelines argument for a moment and think about this: Which nation’s refineries are cleaner, more efficient and more Gaia-friendly?

If President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline and his disdain for American jobs isn’t the number one campaign issue this fall, then the GOP is doing it wrong. (A too likely possibility.)

Perhaps the most distressing thing is the way this has played in the media. Predictably, the Obama administration complains that Republicans made him do it, but nowhere in their coverage of the he said/she said of this week’s announcement in the major media is that this pipeline has been studied for three years by multiple federal agencies. This is not new technology. This is not traversing an area of the U.S. where there are no pre-existing pipelines or where there haven’t been a plethora of environmental studies for other projects over the decades. We know the lay of the land. And three years isn’t enough?

Yet the media dutifully protects its preferred presidential candidate, portraying him as a victim of the mean Republicans while at the same time testifying to his brilliant political strategy.

And oil prices continue to rise and jobs continue to be scarce.