Why @SenAngusKing Voted For The Keystone XL Pipeline But Pretended He Didn't

Source: Daily Kos

Senator Angus King put on quite a show at the University of Maine in Farmington Jan. 23 where he was speaking on foreign policy at a Fulbright Association event.

Angus used to hang with the hippies in my neighborhood back in the day, smoking pot and railing against the system. Now Angus has become the system, making millions off of industrial wind and serving in the U.S. Senate with his new BFF Susan Collins (a point he saw fit to make several times in the course of his remarks).

After a sycophant stroked the great man's ego by noting that media pundits refer to him as "King of Maine" my husband Mark Roman led off his question with a reference to another King of Maine, the best selling author who lives in Bangor. This got a laugh and helped Mark in his quest not to sound angry, a goal he had for communicating with the audience feeling so warmly toward their senator.

What my husband asked Sen. King was, why did you vote in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline project? King's disingenuous reply was the he didn't vote to move the Keystone XL pipeline project forward, he voted for open debate in the Senate.

Right. As if none of us understood parliamentary procedure and the fact that moving to bring an item to the floor is a more significant "yes" vote than the promised vote against the project at the end of the process.

I was reminded of how Mike Michaud used to tell us when we'd visit him to complain about the Pentagon budget that, if Chellie Pingree really wanted to kill the defense spending bill like she said she did, she wouldn't vote yes in committee to move it to the floor.

King's most significant performance of the day was establishing once and for all that he, like Collins, is in AIPAC's back pocket. (CODEPINK's Ridgely Fuller demanded that King let a woman ask a question following two men, and her question on U.S. support for Israel's war machine created the opportunity for a performance by King that is sure to have Netanyahu beaming. More on that later.) Note King's reference to being a talking head guest of Bill Maher, notorious Zionist hack, in this video clip of his looooong answer to the question of whether he would vote no on the Keystone XL pipeline in the future:

Because, really, why settle for being King of Maine when you could be the next Al Gore?