The Alarmist Presidency | FrontPage Magazine

The Alarmist Presidency | FrontPage Magazine

There’s a school of thought among conservatives and libertarians that liberals knowingly seed and fertilize phony crises in order to cultivate even more big government. While I don’t wholly discount that point of view, I think the sky-is-falling mentality that permeates the Obama administration’s approach to environmental issues is more the result of living within the liberal echo chamber for so long.

Environmentalists and their Democrat allies spent eight years screaming that the Bush administration and corporate America were destroying the environment and putting our lives at risk. Having been handed the keys of state, Obama naturally embraces those voices that offer “solutions” to a problem that never actually existed. Democrats being Democrats, those solutions naturally involve benevolent government intervention.

It’s a chicken and egg argument in any case. Does the liberal desire for socialism consciously create phony problems, or does it merely exploit crackpot ideas that fit in with the program? Either way, this administration hasn’t yet met an environmental “crisis” it isn’t willing to address by rolling up its sleeves and getting down to the dirty work of drawing up more rules that will protect the ignorant masses who have been exploited by big businesses for so long. The latest example of this phenomenon is a report from the President’s Cancer Panel which attributes cancer to the supposed poisoning of America. Entitled “Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now,” the report was prepared by a couple of academics: LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., M.D. of the Howard University College of Medicine and Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D. of the University of Texas. A couple of paragraphs from the letter that accompanies the report, signed by Leffall and Kripke, gives you the flavor: