In one of the most bizarre, convoluted columns I have read in a long while, Marc Lame, Ph.D., writes that we should think of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an abused child.

Like an abused child too terrified to perform normal tasks, is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency too terrified to do its job?

His column’s opening question above, as printed in the Kokomo Tribune on 4/25/2012, sets the stage for the inanity that follows.

Dysfunctional, co-dependent and functionally paralyzed describe some children who have been physically abused by their parent. These situations are made worse when the victim realizes those who are supposed to protect them will not. This is exactly what happened to the EPA under the George W. Bush administration regarding global warming and pesticide regulation. At this point the victim becomes damaged and confused to the point where they seek attention from the abusers. As surely as these victims of abuse become less able to function in a normal world they also become more vulnerable to co-optation. I believe this is what might be happening to the EPA. Not only is it afraid to function but when it does, it functions to please their abusers. The EPA needs to be protected and learn to trust. In kind it must learn to behave properly and be accountable.

My first reaction was a resounding, “Huh?” The United States Constitution was not written and ratified for the creation and protection of government agencies. It was written and ratified to prevent government from becoming the kind of expanding, controlling entity that our Founders experienced and soundly rejected. Yet Dr. Lame, a professor of environmental management in the School of Public Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, herein indicates that not only do government agencies have a human-like nature of their own, but that it is the role of the representative body of this nation to care for these unelected bureaucracies with loving concern and tenderness.

Two days earlier, The Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne, Indiana, reported that a release from Environment America cites that Indiana ranks highest in pollutant discharges into rivers. That may be, but the reports did not indicate that the levels cited exceed any limits established by law, regulation, or policy. The purpose of the article, like that of Dr. Lame’s, was to place blame for any environmental woe, real or perceived, on Republicans and anyone not falling within their categories of liberal minion.

Providentially, and ironically, on the same day that The Journal Gazette’s article was reprinted in The Kokomo Tribune, 4/23/2012, “News of the Weird” by Chuck Sheppard featured an EPA-related incident:

A 2007 federal energy-independence law required companies that supply motor fuel in the U.S. to blend in a certain cellulose-based ingredient starting in 2011 – even though (as the Environmental Protection Agency well knows) the ingredient simply does not now exist. A New York Times reporter checked with the EPA in January and found that the companies will still have to pay the monetary penalties for noncompliance (and almost certainly the stiffer penalties for 2012, since the ingredient is still two or three years from development). “It belies logic,” said a petrochemical trade associate executive.

Think any of this has any impact at all on the prices we are paying at the pump? Think any of this has any impact at all on our death spiral of debt in this nation? Think any of this has any impact at all on the loss of American competitiveness in the global markets?

According to the warped logic of those living in the land of left-believe, the most important thing America needs right now and anytime in the future is hundreds and thousands more pages of regulations added to the thousands already in existence.

Tell ya’ what, libs. I’ll be more prone to agree with your notion of more government agency regulatory takeover of our personal lives if I can sit down with you, open up a few pages of IRS law already on the books, and have you explain in clear, concise detail how those regulations are supposed to be understood and implemented by the normal taxpayer and business owner. If you believe that more regulations are the utopian answer to our lives in America, then actually sit down with the regulations we already have and explain them to the normal educated American today. On top of that, justify why we need thousands of more pages in addition to what we already have.

Oh, wait, I already have the answer. There are certainly more non-existent ingredients in existence out there that can be used as a basis to punish businesses that are trying to provide useful and necessary goods and services to customers as well as trying to expand our national economic interests around the world.

Environmental Protection Agency... poor abused child. Only in the land of left-believe.

Spoiled child sounds like the more logical description.