Posted on 12/28/2010 11:33:40 AM PST by neverdem
S'more, Please
One key ingredient in Sarah Palin’s political dynamite is the cheerful scorn with which she regards Washington, a small but zesty serving of which she recently dished up for First Lady Michelle Obama and her anti-obesity crusade. During an episode of her reality show, the once (and future?) candidate cooked up a mess of hot s’mores and a side of even hotter politics, declaring: “This is in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert.”
Palin was being over-generous in her paraphrase. What Mrs. Obama in fact said was considerably more worrisome: “We can’t just leave it up the parents.” Her particular target was unhealthful school lunches, which parents presumably require help from distant federal authorities to improve; it is clear from this and much else that the first lady envisions a very broad role for the federal government in menu planning. If her vision leaves any room for limitation on government interference in family affairs, it is impossible to detect it. Palin, responding specifically to this boundless license for federal meddling, later expanded on her views: “Instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us, according to some politician’s — or politician’s wife’s — priorities, just leave us alone, get off our back, and allow us, as individuals, to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own decisions.” (There is something particularly delicious in Palin’s tone when she pronounces the words “politician’s wife” — if there should be such a thing as a Palin administration, we are confident that the apparently easygoing Mr. Palin will not evolve into the first scold.)
As is the case with practically all things Palin, this latest statement has led to a predictable chorus of harrumphing nanny-staters, not every one of whom is obviously qualified to lecture the body politic on healthful eating. CNN’s fulsome Roland Martin declared Palin’s observation “so stupid that it defies logic,” and added that the former governor is too ignorant to “understand how devastating obesity is to the future of the United States.” Defying logic, Mr. Martin, along with practically all of Mrs. Palin’s critics on the issue, is missing a piece in his argument: specifically, even a smattering of evidence that busybody campaigns of the sort in which Mrs. Obama is engaged are likely to do more good than harm when it comes to extraordinarily complex issues such as obesity — which is indeed positioned to impose significant costs, both financial and human, on the American people.
The evidence is, in fact, to the contrary, suggesting that well-intentioned government policies will make the problem worse: To the extent that political action has thus far affected American obesity, it has been a thumb on the wrong side of the scales, subsidizing the worst kinds of foods through the farm-subsidy and school-lunch programs, and often giving out precisely the wrong kind of dietary advice.
Obesity is, in truth, among our least tractable public-health problems. It is an absolute Gordian knot of nutrition, behavior, genetics, child-rearing environments, hormonal biology, economics, and other factors too numerous and too subtle to catalog. As New York University obesity-policy scholar Rogan Kersh has noted, the problem “has proved impervious to clinical treatment or public-health exhortation,” and it is by no means clear what, if anything, public policy can accomplish, or what the best avenue for reform is, if indeed there is one. For an administration prone to smug castigation of its predecessors for their allegedly insufficient deference to scientific expertise, the Obama team is here shockingly cavalier about a scientific question of substantial depth and complexity. If Mrs. Obama, between her undergraduate major in sociology, her minor in African-American studies, and her law degree somehow managed also to acquire a great deal of expertise regarding a medical issue that has proved remarkably difficult for actual scholars and learned authorities, she has not seen fit to share how and where she acquired it.
Mrs. Obama’s “eat your veggies” crusade is at once a remarkably shallow response and a remarkably ambitious one: She may know next to nothing about the deeper issues, but she has adamant faith that the transformative quality of political power will allow even the most ignorant politician — or politician’s wife — to ameliorate any problem, even one that has thus far proved “impervious to clinical treatment.” By the same token, Mrs. Palin’s dismissal of that conceit contains more wisdom than is understood by political entrepreneurs of the Obama variety or by their factota in the media. Advantage: Palin.
First ladies have their causes, the general rule of which is that they do less damage the farther away from public policy they stay. If the Obama administration should happen to win the wars (and keep the won wars won) and balance the budget, head off the looming fiscal crisis, and present the American people with the head of Osama bin Laden, perhaps at that time it can get back to us about the broccoli. Until then, we have more of an appetite for Mrs. Palin’s healthy skepticism of governmental ambition than for Mrs. Obama’s overegged federal pudding: Washington has enough on its plate.
Curious as to whether Michelle’s Obesity Crusade will include the elimination of certain “junk” foods from the food stamp program. No more grape sodies or fatty foods purchased with govt food stamps
Michelle Obama is the queen of glittering jewels of colossal ignorance.
And to make things humorous, she’s a heck of a lot smarter than her lump-a-dump hubby, who is the baseline from which all intelligence is measured.
"Go You Chicken Fat, Go" was, if memory serves, the theme song.
A black teenage girl and her 2 siblings from Houston, IIRC, were left abandoned in a west African country (Nigeria, IIRC) by their mother who had run off with from some guy she met on the ‘Net.
They went thru hell trying to get back to the USA. People would not believe they were US citizens and even the US consular officials were not perfectly convinced. The children were left in an orphanage and beaten and near starvation. When they finally did get back home, after some harrowing times, she was asked by some reporter what she had learned during her ordeal.
She replied, “I learned there are no poor people in the United States.”...............
Practically unenforceable.
Obesity will make the country weaker only if the healthy are dragged down by having to pay for the obese’s medical care.
What would be the effect on those inclined to eat a lot if they knew they had to pay for their own tummy-shrink, joint replacements, circulatory problems ...
The elephant in the room here is that the federal government has no authority to tell people what to eat.
Now that this obesity deal is law, I wonder if Mrs. Obama is still proud of her country?
“We can’t leave it to the parents”? Hell’s bells, ma’am, those are THE people who voted for your husband!
No way would Todd turn into the first scold. It’ll be a nice change to have a First Dude.
Go, you chicken fat, go away...
Go, you chicken fat, go....
Good times. LOL!
What Mrs. Obama in fact said was considerably more worrisome: We cant just leave it up the parents.
If we know who they are?
Once in a while, when I’m feeling masochistic, I bounce these ideas off my lib-in-law.
Why not just let people make their own decisions and keep your, and the gov’t’s, nose out of their business?
The answer I got was that 60% of the population is incapable of making their own decisions, so someone has to make decisions for them.
In thinking about this, I think the reason they have this attitude is two-fold.
Firstly, it puts the lib “shepherds” in a superior intellectual position - they are better equipped than most of the other people.
Secondly, it puts them in a _morally_ superior position because they “care” about those who can’t take care of themselves.
Animal nutrition studies have shown that, all other things being equal, the animal receiving fewer calories will live longer than its well fed counterpart. A camel has a hump that carries a sufficient amount of fat to carry the animal through lean times...Mooch carries her hump in the rear. Moral? Mooch will survive a famine longer than you or me. In the meantime, and while the country is somewhat free of the Mooch food police, I’ll have the double whopper w/cheese and fries.
The hippo in the room is the fact that the federal government is to BLAME for much of the obesity problems, including corn subsidies, corrupt nutritional advice (eat grain, not butter, etc.) and so on.
Replace the federal nannies with the advice: eat the kind of foods your granny ate, and in moderation. And end all federal distortions on food markets.
Good points, all, MrB!
They sure do have better judgement than us, don’t they?
I had quite a discussion the other night with an in-law - who should know better.
I finally said this: “I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.” Hah!
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