I didn’t watch the SOTU — I probably wouldn’t have even if I had been on the right side of the Pacific. But I’m reading some of the reporting; and because evil is more interesting than good, I think the most revealing remarks actually came from Joni Ernst’s GOP reply.

Not that she offered a realistic alternative — but that’s the point. As far as anyone can tell, the dominant Republican economic idea is to license the Keystone pipeline. And that’s ridiculous.

The standard estimate — accepted by pipeline advocates — is that building the pipeline would temporarily add 42,000 jobs, the vast bulk of which would go away after two years. That’s in an economy with 140 million workers. So Keystone would temporarily increase US employment by 0.03, that’s right, 0.03 percent. Or to put it another way: given the recent pace of job creation, the number one GOP policy priority, basically the only job measure the party has to offer, would create about as many jobs as the Obama recovery is adding every five days.

So there’s a mystery here. Do Republicans not know this? (I’m not a scientist, man — or a mathematician.) Do they know it but count on the innumeracy of voters, having found that pipelines sound good to focus groups?

In other news, Ernst spoke about Obamacare as a failed policy — because a sharp drop in the number of uninsured and a marked slowdown in health costs are clear evidence of failure. Actually, in this case I suspect that Republicans truly are ignorant — Fox News only reports bad news, so if that’s what you watch you just know that things are going badly.