It's hard to believe it took more than 30 years to get Congress to approve drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska - not only because Republicans had control of Congress and the White House during the Bush years and could have done it then, but also because the arguments against it are so transparently absurd.
Democrats' insistence that delicate ecosystems would be thrown out of whack by a tiny postage stamp of oil exporation on thousands of square miles of land never made any sense. People pictured unfortunate caribou getting doused with gushers of crude, but the reality is nothing like that an never has been.