Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Number Two Terrorist In Obama's Crosshairs

Now that macho man Obama has personally rid the world of its top terrorist, it's time to move on to the second most evil man in the world--Ronald McDonald. Bin Laden merely ordered a few thousand deaths. Ronald McDonald is systematically killing off the entire American populace by forcing them to eat high fat, high calorie fast food.

Like Pharaoh and Herod the Great before him, McDonald is perpetuating the slaughter of the innocents on a grand scale. Unlike bin Laden, Ronald McDonald is an American citizen, so we can add the charge of treason to his rap sheet. Hang the clown at high noon. Recently, a Michelle Obama-inspired claque took out full page ads in several metropolitan newspapers with the caption "McDonald's--Stop marketing junk food to kids." The signers included left wing members of the Physicians for Responsible Medicine (PRM) and alternative/holistic quack Andrew Weil. The AMA describes PRM as a group which perverts medical science in pursuit of a vegan agenda.

Why are they going after McDonald's? That's easy. It's a capitalistic success story. Produce meals that are nutritious, palatable and relatively cheap, then encourage people to come to your restaurant to eat. How dare they? Instead of blaming parents who simply refuse to control their children, they blame childhood obesity (and adult obesity, for that matter) on a highly-successful capitalistic fast food corporation.

The food fascists are launching attacks on Ronald McDonald that have the same fury previously reserved for icon Joe Camel. Poor innocent children are being lured into a dangerous activity by a lovable cartoonish character. The Joe Camel character was arguably misleading, and the attack was hysterical. But we all know that smoking is bad for you, and Joe Camel might have convinced some kids to take up the noxious habit. Children should not be enticed into smoking. Children who take up the habit tend to become adults who continue the habit, with all the attendant health problems created by smoking.

Ronald McDonald is a whole different thing. He is encouraging something that does absolutely no harm whatsoever, and produces a product absolutely essential to human existence--food. The food fascists ignore the real problem. Excess anything is bad for you. If you don't have enough iodine in your diet, you will develop goiters, and even fatal health problems. That doesn't mean you should rush to the medicine cabinet and down a bottle of iodine. McDonald's produces a decent food product, acceptably nutritious and affordable. A Big Mac and a Coke will fill a kid's belly, give him a meal that is quite wholesome, and if it's a Happy Meal, the kid will even get a toy. Good marketing, and harmless.

So is Ronald McDonald the charming villain who is causing childhood obesity? Well, if you count the number of Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, Super-size Cokes and other things consumed by kids at the restaurants, he might be indirectly responsible. But only for producing the food and the marketing. This clown does not force children to eat his wares at the point of a gun. He doesn't advocate buying as many Big Macs as your distended stomach can handle. His advertising is fun for kids, and successful, but it is not deceptive. So who's the real culprit?

Preteen obese kids are not Ronald's fault. The same kids getting obese at McDonald's would get obese at The Four Seasons or at the Ritz-Carlton, if those restaurants were kid-friendly and affordable. Preteens aren't welcome at either of those places without parents. And they are unlikely to be spending a lot of time or money at McDonald's without adults either. Most of those obese kids go to McDonald's accompanied by obese parents who can't say "no" to themselves or their kids. If you could buy a big Porterhouse Steak and a bottle of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild for the same price as a Big Mac and a Coke, they'd probably order that.

If McDonald's changed its per-person prices to match those of the fancy-schmantzy restaurants and promised kids that in lieu of toys they'd be treated to chamber quartet music, they'd be out of business in twenty-four hours. But the food fascists see low-priced fast food as a threat to their agenda of replacing parents with government bureaucrats. For people who are almost entirely "pro-choice," they sure seem to think that choices of restaurants and menus should be the sole province of the government.

The daily menu at the Friends School for Rich People that the Obama children attend may be somewhat better fare than that at McDonald's, but certainly not enough better to justify the price that most Americans could never afford on a daily basis. A McDonald's salad may not be as fancy as the one served at the Friends School, but a vegetable is a vegetable, and until recently "eat your vegetables" was a universal parental demand.

The food fascists have a very poor understanding of economics and the market. McDonald's doesn't produce good, inexpensive meals in a family-friendly environment because they have a secret strategy for killing Americans by creating obesity. They are successful because a huge majority of Americans want what McDonald's offers. It's not like Americans who want to use heroin, or Americans who want to smoke. It's Americans who want to eat (a vital human need), and do so quickly in a fast-moving society at an affordable price. But even ignorant peasants like me who patronize McDonald's from time to time know that four or five Big Macs at a sitting, washed down by a gallon of soft drinks, is not good for their kids. Apparently, a whole lot of today's parents either don't know that, or don't care. That's not Ronald's fault.

I raised three kids and am actively involved in the lives of my eight grandkids. All have eaten with a certain regularity at McDonald's, and the younger ones really want those toys in the Happy Meals. But neither I nor my adult children allow the grandkids to get four toys by eating four Happy Meals at a sitting. All my grandkids are slim, active and healthy. I'll put my two oldest granddaughters up against the Obama girls any day in the week. Ronald McDonald is not standing behind anyone demanding that the young'uns eat more, more, more. It isn't either the food or Ronald McDonald that causes obesity in children. It's quite simply overeating encouraged or ignored by negligent parents.

If Ronald and the McDonald's restaurants disappeared tomorrow, unsupervised and undisciplined children would still find their big quantities of affordable food somewhere else. Not the Four Seasons, of course, but at Burger King, Wendy's, Carl's Junior, and a host of others. The food fascists need to pick them off one at a time, and they've simply chosen the most successful capitalistic food enterprise of them all to start with.

And so, I have one remaining question. Does anyone have a handy comparison of the funds raised, the children helped and the families comforted by the Michelle Obama Proper Food for Kids Fund versus the Ronald McDonald House?

21 comments:

Libertarian Advocate said...

Whoa.. Ronald McDonald as the Joker's evil twin?

T-Rav said...

So, according to this logic, shouldn't Michelle Obama launch a coup or something against Barack for eating fast food and thereby setting a bad example for their children? After all, as leader of the First Family, isn't it really creating a national security issue to be so unhealthy? Isn't it?

Unknown said...

Libertarian Advocate: You didn't know that? LOL

Unknown said...

T-Rav: Michelle hasn't told Barack that he's only holding that position temporarily. She's preparing a special ingredient to sprinkle on his Big Mac when he isn't looking. You probably didn't know that her middle name is Lucretia. The next Obama administration won't have "Barack" in the title.

Jocelyn said...

And I don't think it's about McDonald's being a prime example of capitalism, it's just they want control. I mean, they are banning school lunches brought from home in Chicago (I don't remember if it was just one school, or a whole district).

And they are on top of them smokers. Banning them to smoke anywhere in public spaces in NYC.

Like you said LawHawk, moderation is key. Thanks for the article.

Unknown said...

Jocelyn: I agree. But it was easier with the schools since the statist bureaucrats already attained control of them decades ago. Now it's time for them to take over private enterprise in the same fashion to gain the control you spoke of. They want control over every facet of our lives, and they won't rest until they have it or a free people throw them out of office and out of government.

T-Rav said...

LawHawk, I'm just subscribing to the theory that Blogger is out to get all of us. I have no way to prove this, of course, but I will fanatically hold to it nonetheless.

I read an excerpt from Netanyahu's speech, and it was pretty good. Takeaway line (to paraphrase): When will everyone stop talking about the Palestinians' right of return and start talking about the Israelis' right to survival? Awesome.

Also, did you see that Harry Reid even came out against TOTUS' remarks on the 1967 boundaries?

Unknown said...

T-Rav: "Blogger hates us, this I know . . . " It just ate the response I wrote. So I'll do it again.

What the tech-heads at Blogger consider to be a "challenge" we bloggers consider to be a major pain. Part of the fun of blogging (unlike old media) is that we get immediate responses, from the heart as much as from the brain. Glitches and delays interrupt that spontaneity.

My favorite part of Netanyahu's speech was when he said that Israel would be generous with land ceded to the Palestinian state so that there would be plenty of room for "Palestinians" to exercise the right of return--to Palestine, not to Israel. Israel didn't throw the bastards out, they joyfully ran to Jordan to await the destruction of the then-fledgling Jewish state. He was adamant about Jerusalem remaining solely in Israeli hands, undivided.

As for Reid, I think Obama has so little knowledge about the history of Israel that he thinks, like the youthful ignoramuses who voted for him, that nobody will know that the 1967 borders were the result of an unsuccessful and unprovoked attack on Israel. Anyone over the age of fifty, including Reid, knows that because they were adults when it happened. To deny something he saw with his own eyes was too much even for Reid.

AndrewPrice said...

Ironically, I almost had McDonalds for breakfast. They do make good breakfasts.... yum. Oh oh, Michelle Obama isn't going to like that. Oh well, I don't really care what Michelle Obama likes.

Unknown said...

Andrew: If you didn't have broccoli with your breakfast, you're as bad as Hitler. You also dissed Michelle, so in fact you're worse than Hitler.

StanH said...

More and more, the leftist loons are exposing themselves for what, and who they are, your word, Fascist! Meddlesome little Nazi’s who don’t mind their own business. I know as a father of two grown kids, a Happy Meal saved my parental ass more than once, and neither one of my kids like McDonalds any longer, at least until their kids come along.

Anonymous said...

All I can say is they better keep their grubby paws off of my Egg McMuffin and Filet O'Fish! :(

TJ

Unknown said...

Stan: I never lost my taste for Big Macs. Don't know why. But when the kids aren't around, I always get two. Whenever I have the grandkids all day, they always want to go to McDonald's. It may be my cooking, but I think my grilled hamburgers are delicious. However, I don't have the recipe for the secret sauce. LOL

Unknown said...

TJ: I tried my first Egg McMuffin very late in my epicurean life. When I was working at Stanford, I had to be there earlier than my preference. So I'd buy a McMuffin or two at the train station and eat it on the way from San Francisco to Palo Alto. Then I'd have a Big Mac at lunch on the premises. Then, the trustees decided that McDonald's wasn't high-tone enough for the students, and attracted "the wrong people" (meaning the thugs from East Palo Alto). I was furious. That only left restaurants that served $5.00 rabbit food and $10.00 hamburgers. More reason for me to hate Stanford.

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

This doesn't surprise me at all. It really is the simple way of correcting a problem that has been exaggerated by the CDC. In other words, people who had a few extra pounds are now considered morbidly obese.

The movie called Fat Head is the response to Super Size Me. Both can be found on NetFlix.
Fat Head also gets into fats and that they have been unfairly dissed as well. Tom Naughton took a McDonald's only diet and lost weight. He did it under a doctor's care and the result is this documentary.

He totally refutes the idea that fast food is bad for you and explains how the guy who did Super Size Me over ate that month and that is why the poser gained weight. There are more revelations in the video. It is also very entertaining.

BevfromNYC said...

The real irony with picking on McDonalds is that McD's has always been particularly responsive to criticism. When the Enviro-weenies went after them for their styrofoam packaging, they quickly switched to paper.

When the plaintiff's bar filed their first test case in Queens on behalf of some 400lb guy, McD's added "healthy choices" like salads, apples slices and other lower calorie items to their menu. Even though the case was thrown out by the judge.

Of course as I write this I realize maybe that is why they using McD's as their poster child for poor nutrition. They are responsive.

The bottom line is when McD's and all of the other fast food places came on the scene, Moms still cooked most meals. You remember, those meals that included the 4 major food groups and where you had to eat your vegetables or you wouldn't get dessert! It was never envisioned that people would use fast restaurants as their main source of nutrition.

Unknown said...

Joel: Unfortunately, too many people saw and bought into the "Super Size Me" crap and ignored the much more scientific and meaningful "Fat Head." Naughton's results even surprised me, but not as much as it would surprise a food fascist.

Cheryl said...

I actually do give a hoot about the calorie count postings at the fast food places. Nutrition and eating right and keeping my weight down matters to me but I'm not a Nazi about it and when I find myself in need of a quick meal, I try to make an informed, better-than-horrible choice. I'm thankful McD's and others have done this.

Unknown said...

Cheryl: I have no objection to the posting of the calorie count, but I know I don't look at it. I guess maybe it's that "three square meals a day, and eat your vegetables" thing that my mother hammered into my head that keeps my weight right and constant. I do realize that some people conscientiously watch their calorie count, and that's a good thing too. I just wouldn't have a clue about how to relate the calories to what I should be eating every day.

Anonymous said...

I occasionally eat at McDonald's because it's the place I can afford. I order a salad and coffee and milk, and they are good quality.
But around me, are lots of kids eating double cheeseburgers and fries and cokes. They do make unwise choices, and will pay for those dearly, like teen smokers.

I am all for moderation. Coke? ok in moderation (OKIM). Heroin? OKIM. Burgers & fries? OKIM. Cheating on your spouse? OKIM.
Stealing? OKIM. Yes, moderation is the key!

Can someone explain the relationship between McDonald's and Netanyahu? I feel so confused.

thundercatkp said...

...just wanted to clarify something...that was disturbing because someone actually took time to make a vidoe game against Micky D's.

Talk about products aimed at kids.

...I'm wondering if they realize all the publicity they are giving McDonald's.

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