It's natural to resist change, but the astonishingly ugly attacks from the GOP and the 'tea party' on Michelle Obama's anti-obesity effort lack any logic, reflecting our deeply divisive political times.
Excerpt:
“Certain members of the GOP — and, from the looks of it, the entire "tea party" — have decided that the first lady's Let's Move campaign, which seeks to fight obesity by improving school lunch programs, increasing focus on physical education and giving poor people better access to healthful foods, is an example of government intrusion and even a socialist plot.
Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann accused
Oh, and then there's that paragon of physical fitness, Rush Limbaugh, who suggested last week that the first lady "does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue."
What's going on here (besides the last gasps of an increasingly irrelevant radio blowhard) obviously has nothing to do with keeping kids from being obese. Surely even the most obtuse tea partyers know deep down that Michelle Obama is not planning to force-feed you vegetables and hijack your desserts any more than Laura Bush, who advocated for reading, was interested in foisting books on people and carting away their televisions. Instead, Republicans are turning a patently apolitical issue into an opportunity to bash the president, suggesting that the first lady has wasted tax dollars with her campaign and that the president's budget proposal, which includes adding $1 billion a year for the next 10 years to fund children's nutrition programs, will ruin the nation because it caters to her elitist whims. (Does anyone remember that Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign "Just Say No" coincided with $1.7 billion in funding to fight the growing drug problem?)” – Meghan Daum Read the Whole Column
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