Gene Healy Says David Brooks' Paean to Presidential Power Is Year's Worst Op-Ed
You'd think it's nearly April Fools' Day, not Christmas.
For four years running, Gene Healy has closed the holiday season with a column saying "bah, humbug" to the year's worst op-eds. Christmas came early this year, thanks to perennial contender David Brooks. In Thursday's New York Times, Brooks offered a bold panacea for the problems of our time: We need to "Strengthen the Presidency." It strikes Healy as counterintuitive to imagine that a president with a drone fleet, a "kill list," dragnet databases of Americans' personal information, and increasingly arbitrary authority over health care's one-sixth of the U.S. economy has too little power.