Rudy or the Lead?

In one of the strangest attacks I've seen yet on a GOP candidate, Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post writes about a study linking lead in gasoline to criminal activity. How does that affect the GOP? Rudy Giuliani's biggest strong point, besides his response to 9/11, is his cleanup of New York City's high crime rate. This writer attempts to credit the removal of lead from gasoline for New York's lower crime rate, totally discounting the effect of a strong, law enforcement mayor:

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

"I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

The attack is mild at that point, but the purpose of the piece becomes clear in the last paragraph:

Nevin's finding implies a double tragedy for America's inner cities: Thousands of children in these neighborhoods were poisoned by lead in the first three quarters of the last century. Large numbers of them then became the targets, in the last quarter, of Giuliani-style law enforcement policies.

In other words, the poor criminals of the inner cities have been victimized twice - first by the lead in the gasoline of passing cars, and then by a mayor who actually believed in enforcing the law and cleaning up the city.

Why do lefty journalists hate law enforcement so much? Don't they want to live in a safe, orderly society? It's not really that hard to understand. In lefty world, not only are you innocent until proven guilty, you're innocent even after you're proven guilty. There are no guilty people, just victims of society, or "the man", or "big corporations", or leaded gasoline, or whatever. They just don't get it.

Nice try, Shankar, but you're going to have to come up with something a lot more intelligent than that to try and discount Rudy's crime fighting work as mayor.