I've generally held a certain amount of esteem for conservative columnist David Brooks. Sure we don't see eye-to-eye on issues, but he at least puts up a principled, reasoned defense of his positions.
No more.
Some of you have remarked on a certain shift ever since Mr. Brooks got his big gig at the NYTimes. The theory seems to run like this: ever since he became a hot commodity he's had to sell himself as the "reasonable intellectual from the Right", a nice, sober Rightie that places like NPR and the Times could take home to mother (or their editors).
Inherent in that shift is a need to pick up certain Neo-con cudgels. I've resisted this viewpoint and even taken up for Brooks in the past, but this column has finally crossed the line.
The column is entitled "Clearing the Air" and in it Brooks defends Bush's environmental record.
Huh?
The most ambitious Bush proposal is over the nature of environmental regulation itself. Bush inherited a command-and-control regulatory regime called new-source review, which has metastasized into a regulatory behemoth. The administration is trying to supersede it with a cap-and-trade system.
What Brooks sees as reform, others see as dangerous to our health.
If you want a single example that captures why so many people no longer believe in the good intentions of the Bush administration, look at the case of mercury pollution.
During the 1990s, government regulation greatly reduced mercury emissions from medical and municipal waste incineration, leaving power plants as the main problem. In 2000, the EPA determined that mercury is a hazardous substance as defined by the Clean Air Act, which requires that such substances be strictly controlled. EPA staff estimated that enforcing this requirement would lead to a 90 percent reduction in power-plant mercury emissions by 2008.
A few months ago, however, the Bush administration reversed this determination and proposed a "cap and trade" system for mercury.
This is coming from the Salt Lake Tribune, not necessarily a breeding-ground of liberal thought.
My point: Brooks is misleadingly packaging a Bush Administration attempt to give polluters a break (one that is dangerous to our health) as reform. He is using the same deceptive tactics that we have come to despise the Bush Administration for. This is Ann Coulter in less incendiary language.
Brooks also states:
The Bush administration's biggest air pollution failure has been its inability to restart the global warming debate.
Again we see Brooks trying to slip one by us. Inability? That implies that an attempt has been made. But Bush has made no attempt to restart the global warming debate -- his Administration did not even recognize the existence of global warming until a few months ago, and then said that it had nothing to do with human activity.
This column is, unfortunately, emblematic of the Brooks that has emerged since the NYTimes acquisition. I liked the old Brooks, who made sense and who I felt was trying to be honest with me. I don't like people who try to trick me, Left or Right. That's what, unfortunately, it appears Brooks has become.