I’m tempted to ask a question: Who wrote this? Was it the script for a voice over, read as the title and credits unfurled , for one of those epic Disney movies featuring a frontiersman like Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone? It has the saccharine ring of that genius of lowbrow American entertainment, while being eminently useful in the maintenance of the idea of American Virtue. Although Mr. Brooks adds a necessary sour note, a kind of weathered cynicism about our ‘political gridlock’.

The central protagonist of Mr. Brooks’ column of November 4,2011 is John Rowe.

“John Rowe, the chief executive of the utility Exelon, which derives almost all its power from nuclear plants, says that shale gas is one of the most important energy revolutions of his lifetime. It’s a cliché word, Yergin told me, but the fracking innovation is game-changing. It transforms the energy marketplace.”

Mr. Brooks lets us know that the fracking innovation is the wave of the future, while we sit in the shadow of Chernobyl and Fukushima, a wave of the future, now, gone utterly wrong, even that hardly covers the territory. Mr. Rowe is something of an expert on waves of the future and their waxing and waning. But let us discuss the record of Mr. Brooks’ many and varied enthusiasms: The Financial Reform of 1999, Free Market Economics, Iraq and Afghanistan, The Surge, The Bush Restoration, the Republican Party since Reagan. In all, a rather dismal display of bad choices, backed up by a consistent bad judgment. In this instance, Mr. Brooks assures us that he is the voice of reason, between the extremes of the debate and conflict over fracking and unashamedly announces this methodology is the key to our enhanced prosperity in the post 2008 recovery.