Reduced to whining about hamburgers
by digby
Oh dear God. They really sank this low, did they?
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Michelle Obama ordered a “1,700-calorie meal at Shake Shack.” The report drew mockery from several corners for suggesting that by eating a hamburger, the First Lady was somehow behaving hypocritically given her campaign to combat obesity. Right-wingers with ingrained dislike of Michelle Obama, however, ran with the report.Today, the Washington Post is looking to squeeze a little more traffic out the non-story with an online poll: “Is Michelle Obama a hypocrite for loving burgers?” Accompanying the poll is a quick write-up which actually contains these sentences that a real-live journalist wrote and published:
Nutritionists were quick to come to the first lady’s aid, explaining that balance is more important than blind allegiance to any one diet, which is almost certainly true. But here’s the thing: This is not Michelle Obama’s first encounter with a burger in public. A semi-quick Google search reveals that she has dined on burgers at Five Guys (on at least two occasions), Good Stuff Eatery (again more than once and apparently enough to inspire her own turkey burger on Spike Mendelsohn‘s menu) and a Milwaukee diner. Her love of burgers is so well documented that one hack parodied the first lady in this cartoon.
“This is not Michelle Obama’s first encounter with a burger in public.” Chew on that one for a while.
An American has eaten five hamburgers in public? Burn her! Burn the witch!
Americans are all falling over themselves this week patting each other on the back for not being as petty and nasty as the British press. But this just shows how thoroughly idiotic (and petty and nasty) the mainstream American media has become.
Michelle Obama is doing what mothers the world over have been doing since time began: trying to get kids to eat healthy foods. And like mothers the world over, she indulges once in a while and (gasp) lets the kids indulge once in a while too. There is nothing even remotely controversial about this except for the right wing’s irrational hatred for the first lady. That they have to stoop to criticizing her for encouraging children to eat their vegetables and then eating a hamburger just shows how little they have to work with. So little, in fact, that it’s disgusting that a mainstream paper would even mention it.
Ugh.
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