Wasn’t it the eminent scholar of fascism, Jonah Goldberg, who called our attention to the theretofore unnoticed line connecting healthy lifestyles to the death camps? What, has the right wing gotten in touch with their inner health Nazis all of a sudden?
The Surgeon General’s job is a bureaucratic one; I’m sure Benjamin can keep up to date on the latest health news, give lectures and shuffle papers full of statistics as well as any skinny person. It’s not as if she’s going to be leading the nation every morning at eight a.m. in a televised, government-mandated five-mile jog, and needless to say (but I will anyway), if she were going to do something like that, these same people would have one enormous, collective aneurgasm. The howls of outrage would be deafening as our basement-dwelling shut-ins would be frantically stockpiling candy and soda while insisting that the Bill of Rights guaranteed everyone the opportunity to eat junk food soaked in beer for breakfast, who do these granola-munching hippies think they are, and so on.
It’s almost like they just reflexively bitch and complain no matter what.