Glenn Beck targets America’s real enemy: Michelle Obama

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Leader has finally set his gaze upon the real culprit who is rotting America’s foundation: First Lady Michelle Obama. Beck’s main beef with the First Lady is that she wants to help fat children. Actually, she’s trying to combat the issues of childhood hunger and obesity. Or destroy America with her ACORN army. I keep getting the two mixed up.

Anyway, Beck does not trust this whole obesity campaign thing:

BECK: So now going all out to have government limit the food choices available at our kids’ school, to make sure that grocery stores pop up in what they are calling — and I’m not kidding you — food deserts. There’s no salad bars; it’s a food desert. Then we are going to put the grocery stores instead of fast food businesses.

They’ll limit what we can watch on TV, what ads we can run and how long we can watch. No doubt we’ll start mandating certain kind of activities as part of this wonderful government campaign.

Rationing! Censorship! Socialism!

Or none of this is true and Beck is sensationalizing a pretty vanilla, though highly beneficial, food program:

In reality, the Let’s Move initiative aims to issue guidance for front-of-package nutritional labels, educate physicians on childhood obesity, and develop online tools to provide information about health and nutrition. In addition, grants will be available to construct grocery stores and bring farmers’ markets to underserved communities — known as food deserts.

I’m wondering when Beck and Michelle Malkin’s audiences are going to realize no one would watch Beck, or read Malkin, if they didn’t continuously try to “out outrageous” themselves. Beck and Malkin have to keep the threat levels at Hysterical, or Beck’s ratings would plummet, and Malkin wouldn’t boost her precious website hits (the one advertisers pay for).

Hence, the Let’s Move “front-of-package nutritional labeling” program has become the Rationing Censorship Socialist Death March.

Lost in all the lies and hysteria is that obesity is a huge, huge problem in America.

Jamie Oliver recently won the TED Prize for his efforts to create a popular movement that will inspire people to change the way they eat. Here is his speech from TED (h/t Digby). If you’re pressed for time, skip to around 11 minutes and witness how schoolchildren can’t identify basic fruits and vegetables:

This is a chart from Oliver’s speech (apologies for the blurred text). It shows the causes of death in the United States.

The top three causes: heart disease, all cancers, and stroke are largely diet-related issues. Notice “homicide” at the very bottom of the chart.

Malkin recently flew into a tizzy when the First Lady called child obesity a threat to national security, but Michelle Obama is right. Americans’ health is a national security concern. Without our health, humans can’t function at a basic level. Citizens can’t be productive members of society if they’re too fat to get out of the house, or too busy getting their feet amputated from advanced diabetes.

Nearly 10 percent of health spending ($147 billion a year) is used on obesity-related illnesses. If Americans were a healthy people, that money could be redirected into education, infrastructure, or even — the Republicans’ sweetheart – defense! (Not that our bloated military budget needs it. The US military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined, and is over nine times larger than the military budget of China).

The youngest generation of Americans don’t know how to cook for themselves. They don’t know how to identify and prepare good food. If Beck and Malkin genuinely think that constructing grocery stores in poor communities and ensuring children can tell the difference between tomatoes and potatoes is some kind of authoritarian plot, then they are sick human beings that should be ignored by the larger, rational public.

If they don’t really believe any of this, then they’re liars. Either way, it’s not worth risking the health of America’s children over the bile spouted by Beck and Malkin, the unscrupulous media whores who are willing to see defenseless children suffer for the sake of bolstering their contrarian niches.