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?