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If environmentalists were the praying kind, they would say the Arkansas leak was an answer to their prayers. They think it ends the debate over the Keystone pipeline. One green lobbyist says “this should be the nail in the coffin of the Keystone pipeline.” They’re eager to pressure President Obama to veto Keystone.

The Arkansas pipeline, called the Pegasus, was laid down and buried two feet under in 1947, and runs from Patooka, Ill., where it connects to pipelines from western Canada, to refineries in Nederland, Texas. It sprang the leak March 29 at tiny Mayflower, Ark., a bedroom suburb of Little Rock, and spilled up to 5,000 barrels of tar-sands crude through ditches and across lawns of tidy middle-class brick houses, and was stopped just short of the shore of Lake Conway, popular with fishermen. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen.

ExxonMobil, operators of the pipeline, moved quickly when a drop in pressure signaled a leak. Valves 18 miles apart were closed within 16 minutes, shutting off movement of the sluggish crude. About 20 families were required to leave their homes and were put up at nearby hotels by ExxonMobil. Exxon dispatched 120 workmen and 15 vacuum trucks with 33 storage tanks to collect the 12,000 barrels of the oil and water mixture from streets, ditches and lawns. This week they’re steam-cleaning the streets.

To the Luddite environmentalists, life is just one endless tragedy, brought to you by fat Republicans, self-righteous Christians and greedy capitalists who keep inventing evil contraptions like electric lights, indoor plumbing, automobiles, computers and 10-speed blenders. Even bicycles are suspect. They all soak up energy. The Arkansas spill, unless you’re someone on a quiet Mayflower street with oil in the petunia patch, is not insignificant, but not a tragedy.

Mayflower, says one breathless commentator at The Atlantic Wire website, is “a scene straight out of the beginning of a post-apocalyptic movie – thick, black oil running down a suburban street . . . even more dangerous than it looks.”

Most of the people who live in Mayflower are working-class folk, who aren’t happy to see their lawns turned black by oil and are eager to get back into their houses, but they typically understand that “life happens.” Allen Dodson, the county judge (corresponding to county supervisor or manager in other places) says his constituents are mostly concerned about getting home. The oil fumes have “died down,” he says, “and to the untrained nose, it has greatly improved. It smells better than if you were just paving a road.” (Of course, unpaved streets don’t smell at all, if you can keep dogs, horses and pigs away from the dirt.)

Most Mayflower residents, like most Americans elsewhere, are unaware of the thousands of miles of pipeline that run under houses, shopping centers and even schools and hospitals, buried several feet below ground. No one was killed or even hurt at Mayflower, and moving oil in a pipeline is far safer than moving it by train or truck. The difference between a pipeline spill and a train-wreck spill, as the Wall Street Journal observes, is “a lesson in political opportunism.”

Such opportunism is what really smells. The Sierra Club, which never met an endangered slug or snake it wouldn’t embrace, says the Mayflower spill proves that “it’s not a matter of ‘if’ spills will occur on dangerous pipelines like Keystone XL, but rather ‘when’.”

Some oil spills are more fashionable in the compliant media than others. Last week, a Canadian Pacific Railway oil train derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 barrels of crude. This was more than three times the oil spilled at Mayflower, but it went largely unremarked. The implications on safety are profound. As pipelines reach carrying capacity, the volume of oil carried on rail increases – up from 9,000 carloads five years ago to 233,000 carloads last year.

The environmentalists should embrace Keystone if they’e really interested in public safety and pristine countryside. Keystone, with abundant new failsafe technology, will replace pipelines like the Pegasus line through Arkansas. When the 36-inch Pegasus was built right after World War II, few safety requirements were in place, and pipelines, like other parts of the infrastructure, were thrown across the landscape in a hurry, the better to sate pent-up demand for oil and all the things oil makes possible. The mantra was familiar: “Build it and they won’t have to come, because they’re already here.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The mockery of Christianity, and not just the ridicule of individual Christians, has even won the sanction of the courts. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court, which will sanction everything weird and contentious, ruled in 2011 that “hostility to religion” is OK, after a 16-year-old Mormon boy sued his teacher for ridiculing him for his beliefs and said there was no more evidence of the works of God than “there is a giant spaghetti monster living behind the moon.” The class was expected to reward him with a hearty laugh.

Such contempt is not just here, either. In Britain, the BBC commissioned a study to ask why Christians have become the butt of so many “fashionable” jokes. Ann Widdecombe, a novelist, onetime Tory member of Parliament and generally a pricker of intellectual pretense, said the BBC asked her to look at why mockery of Christians has become so prevalent “and to try to explain to a secular world why it matters so much to Christians.” It matters because nobody like to hear his most sacred convictions of conscience mocked, and particularly if his are the only such convictions of conscience ridiculed. Television producers, she observed, feign respect for, or more likely fear of, the followers of Islam and avoid laughing at the Prophet or exploiting abundant opportunities for poking fun. She catalogued a long list of examples of mockery and ridicule of Christianity.

In one program she had to get special permission to watch, which had made even the BBC executives retch and lock it in the vaults where it could never be seen in public, two “skeptics” yukked it up with a representation of the body and blood of Christ, putting chutney on a communion wafer and ordering two bottles of wine to go with it. The program was an episode of a sketch comedy series, and one of the creators, Anil Gupta, professed not to understand why anyone would take offense.

“Stand-up comics tend to make two assumptions,” Miss Widdecombe concluded, “that Christians have no sense of humor and that all their audiences are unbelievers. The first [assumption] is so ignorant as to need no answer but the second explains the trend towards thinking that even the most sacrilegious mockery can be fun. Such comics work on the principle that only stupid people believe in God and that their audiences are too intelligent to do so and will therefore share any joke directed at any aspect of religion.”

Once a taboo in America, aggressive atheism has slipped poison into the mainstream and become a fashionable potion in the salons of the elite. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens have made millions – well, a lot of thousands, anyway – with books espousing the joys and consolations of their faith in, by definition, nothing. This is evidence that a black hole may be better than no hole at all. In fact, there’s even a chaplain for atheists at Harvard, though it’s not clear what an atheist could want from a minister to the soul. (“Please help me, Padre, I’m afraid I’m coming to believe in God.”) Since atheists want to borrow customs and rituals from the religious, we can expect they’ll soon organize themselves to endow colleges, hospitals and contribute millions to the lame, the halt and the poor.)

The late Mr. Hitchens, a fine and friendly fellow when he stepped down from his soapbox, said religion, though not necessarily believers in religion, “should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt.” In the weeks he lay dying he seemed haunted by a fear that at the end he would reach for the consolations of faith, and warned everyone that if anyone heard that he had had a deathbed conversion not to believe it. Curious, and ineffably sad.

Christ told his disciples to expect the scorn of the world and be not dismayed by it, that theirs is the kingdom of heaven. But it’s hard to remember Christ’s counsel, to forgive and pray for those who revile the faith and speak the name of Jesus Christ only as an oath. Christians could remember the story of the blacksmith and a visitor who watched as the smithy pounded hammer and iron against his anvil.

“My, my,” said the visitor. “You must wear out a lot of anvils.”

“No,” the smithy replied. “My great-grandfather used this very anvil. But I do wear out a lot of hammers.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

“I hope I’m a better president now than when I first came into office,” he told reporters at one stop early in his trip. “I’m absolutely sure that there are a host of things that I could have done that would have been more deft and, you know, would have created better optics.”

Now if he’ll only turn from an obsession with “better optics” to the serious statecraft at hand, we can all breathe a little easier. Not a lot, but a little.

There’s no more crucial place to get a late education than in the Middle East, where graduate schools abound in every nook in the brambles and crannies in the ancient rocks. This is one place where making crucial and momentous decisions on the fly risks not only disasters, but invites catastrophes. This is no place for “a man without a foreign policy,” as one commentator remarked, a man with only naïve aspirations who operates on the notion that a chaotic and perilous world can be changed by “the transformative power of a good speech, but no clear path to achieve anything.”

Perhaps the president burned a little midnight oil just in time. Vali Nasr, who was not so long ago a senior insider at the Obama White House, describes in his forthcoming book, “The Dispensable Nation,” how decisions have sometimes been made. On Afghanistan, for example, he says Obama policy-makers were determined not to make long-reaching strategic decisions but to satisfy shifting public opinion. These policy makers, according to an advance reading of Mr. Nasr’s book, comprised “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics.”

Campaign politics Chicago style, where every problem can be solved with a favor or an expertly placed shiv, clearly doesn’t work in the Middle East. President Obama arrived in Jerusalem just when the strategic interests of the United States and the strategic concerns of Israel seemed to be on a collision course. The president has been concerned with spreading clichés and bromides, the prime minister with survival. The photographs of Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unarmed and smiling, were staged to show everyone that despite their history of hostile relations, they could, too, get along without taking or giving a punch.

“To sensation-hungry journalists,” says Zalman Shoval, who twice served as Israeli ambassador to the United States and learned first-hand about the hunger of American journalists for sensations and irrelevancies, “the titillating relationship between Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu is a favorite topic.” He wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “Though personal chemistry does sometimes play a role in international relations – either positive, like that between Golda Maier and LBJ and Richard Nixon, or negative, such as at least intermittently between Yitzhak Shamir and Bush 41 – what really mattered then, and does now, are the respective diplomatic, strategic and often political, on both sides, interests.”

Or, as Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, explained to Queen Victoria when she asked who were England’s permanent friends, “England has no permanent friends, but permanent interests.”

Mr. Obama, making his first trip to Israel as president, had visited Arabia first, in 2009, bowing to kings and caliphs in the vain pursuit of “resetting” American relationships with Muslims. This time, he learned that the intractable problems of the Middle East require more than simple syrup. The president who imagines that his voice is the most reliable weapon in the American arsenal got tripped by his own tongue when he was called to account for the difference between what he said about settlements in 2009 and what he said about them this week in Israel.

Still basking in the bonhomie he enjoyed in Israel, he told Mr. Netanyahu that the Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in eastern Jerusalem were “not constructive or appropriate,” but did not say, as he did in 2009, that building the settlements must cease. When he got to Ramallah the next day for a joint press conference with Mahmoud Abbas, he quickly saw that the Palestinian leader remembered the difference. Abbas launched into a familiar diatribe, the usual history of the world since the Flood. The settlements, he said, were “a hurdle and ignoble” and must be dismantled before there can be real progress toward “peace,” meaning, no concessions, no return to the peace process.

The first lesson in Mr. Obama’s late education is that jaw, jaw may be better than war, war, but be careful to remember what you say, and where you said it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The Democrats have used this formula to great advantage over the years, squabbling like cats and moving on to win elections so they can put far-reaching legislative programs in place. Most of all, Democrats love to fight. “I’m not a member of an organized political party,” the comedian and philosopher Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.”

The Republicans don’t quite get how the game works; they blew a reasonably promising opportunity to take back the U.S. Senate last year when Republican nominees in Missouri and Indiana decided they wanted to be gynecologists, not senators, and lectured voters on how babies are made. The party still might have made it to a Senate majority if other Republicans – the elites, as they imagine themselves – had not saved the Democrats the trouble of organizing a lynch mob. The Democrats politely stepped aside and let the Republican elites lead in destroying their nominees.

Democrats would never have played the game quite that way. They’re not much concerned with good manners or the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury, or the rules of a marquis of anywhere else. They have their own housebreaking rituals, but want first of all to win elections. They generally take the advice that Ronald Reagan once gave to his party, “speak no ill of another Republican.” The Gipper knew the opposition would do that, so why help them?

This week, conservatives from everywhere, Republicans all, converged on Washington – actually a suburb of Washington – for the annual winter meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee, an occasion to size up ambitious governors, senators and others who would be president, and to indulge talk and speculation about 2016. This year they’re “a contentious generation of conservatives,” as The Washington Times called them, learning to squabble successfully like cats and Democrats.

In the wake of losing a national election, there’s always lots to view with alarm, and not much to point with pride about, as the cliché goes, and some of the contentious conservatives are still taking their cues from the Democrats and media liberals, as if by long habit, pounding on Barack Obama’s talking points, continuing to blame George W. Bush for drones, global warming, sinkholes, immigration woes, the economy, the heartbreak of psoriasis and whatever else the White House can find in the morning papers to drool over.

Angelo Codevilla, a professor at Boston University and a CPAC panelist on “the costs of war,” is among those unable to climb out of the rut of 2008. He’s terrified of the buzz that Jeb Bush may be the man for 2016. He thinks Jeb should be “smart enough to know that the name ‘Bush’ is poison in American politics today. The left hates [George W.] and nobody on the right really likes him. If somehow the Republican Party were to nominate Jeb Bush you would have the final defeat of the Republican Party. The Republican Party would cease to exist.”

Or not. There’s always an appetite for doom and gloom, but others at CPAC don’t share the vision of doom and gloom so deep that nothing short of an asteroid, preferably a big one like the one that killed the dinosaurs, could challenge the resurgence of the Bush family. Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, thinks the record of the two Bush presidencies is “mixed” and the positives might outweigh the negatives of the younger brother and former governor of Florida. No one else starts with the strengths of a Bush, he says, “and no family has [such an] attractive Rolodex as the Bush family does, with thousands of loyal followers.”

The great mass of Americans can’t understand why anyone would be talking about an election four years away; most Americans are enjoying the luxury of not thinking about politics at all. But politics and the future is what CPAC is all about; if you don’t obsess about the next election 24/7, CPAC is not the place for you.

Choosing a frontrunner for ’16 is an exercise only for silly people. Of 18 straw polls taken at CPAC to predict Republican nominees, only 3 accurately predicted actual nominees. Straw polls are nevertheless harmless unless taken seriously. But passionate preference can be fun. You could ask the cat.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.