Baroodys: Corleones Of The Right?

Rick Perlstein

May 22, 2007

Michael Baroody, who made his living lobbying against the commission of consumer product safety, has been nominated by President Bush to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The coverage has been excellent, if a bit repetitious: fox guarding henhouse, fox guarding henhouse, fox guarding henhouse - the image repeated ad nauseum, and reasonably so.

(Click on any of the highlighted words above and you'll find a different anti-Baroody recommendation: keeping cigarettes from the horrors of fire-safeness, fighting for all-terrain veicles' right to flip over and kill people, protecting parents from the dangerous knowledge that the cribs and strollers they just bought had been recalled, making the world safe for asbestos, heroically keeping the National Highway and Transportation Safety Board in the dark about accident data on defective tires, keeping government out of the climate-change-prevention biz, and keeping the feds from "silencing commercial speech without authority"—the commercial speech in question being tobacco billboards near schools.)

That's our Michael, as anyone reading a newspaper these days knows.