The opportunity for some humor was obvious.

“liberals conflate Rush Limbaugh's fatness with his vitriol”

Actually, he went on a diet (or starved, or used more drugs than just pain-killers). His girth is old history.

Ah, you just couldn't help it, could you DLS? Something tells me that dems don't listen to MM's ideas, nor do reps hate it, due to any effect of his girth. It's just a nasty little bonus. It definitely bothers me, just like it bothers me greatly when liberals conflate Rush Limbaugh's fatness with his vitriol.

Do you remember quite a few years ago when Charles Manson was interviewed in prison by a woman? Do you know what is the only word for word statement I remember from that interview? CM: “You could stand to lose maybe 10 pounds, couldn't you?” It's an insult that is so easy to make, and cuts so deep (for women in particular), that out of all the totally bat-sh*t crazy stuff he said, that's what I remember. He knew exactly what he was doing in making that statement. Perhaps it's needless to say that it's not an insult that I consider fair play, nor is it one I use.

Yeah, neither side is a monolith on this; I find that most people on both sides, plus the media, plus the government, are in general agreement that there is something “wrong” with fat people. Because of the wide acceptance of that premise, either side can take it and use it to their own ends, which was my point.

Unless you're Michael Moore. [grin]

Note that not everyone on the Right (which is no more monolithic than the Left necessarily is) defends the subsidies. Defending the objects of anti-business and “anti-Big Food” wrath is something entirely different.

Incidentally, here in Michigan there's a television ad that has been playing, against taxes on sweetened beverages, and while I agree with the statement made that there shouldn't be any such new taxes, the ad itself is amusing because of how quickly and shoddily it was put together. In the ad, the character complaining about the proposed taxes takes sweetened beverages out of her vehicle, after opening the hatch in the rear of her vehicle, and she and the kids take the beverages indoors — and close the front door of their home behind them. Nobody returns to the vehicle to, ahem, close the wide-open hatch.

I think Dirty Jerzey ought to reelect Corzine. After all, high taxes and corruption is the state motto.

Note that some lefties, with their PC-slanted “fitness” and appearance-related behaviors and standards, are aping objects they've detested in the past, namely many yuppies.

Meanwhile, I wonder how many re-thought their position when the person who was chosen for Surgeon General was revealed — Regina Benjamin — who is agreed by most to be overweight.

(Lost in this is the idea that just as no two people are like, also there is no single ideal or “correct” fat or weight-index, etc., level. A good object of federal R&D would be to make progress on learning how it can be determined how much fat is too much, for each individual, and ideally, develop a test for this.)

Cultures themselves can change. “Portliness” was associated with prosperity and material(!) success in an earlier time. Once fitness became a fad and lifestyle with many after the Sixties, things reversed. It's reached a point where you have not only have the preoccupied self-absorbed, as one example of excess in the other way, but currently the overweight and an “epidemic” or “crisis” of overweight and obseity as a pretext for political extremism (sugar, salt, and fat taxes, “food policy” lunacy, and related matters) and interventionism (and discriminatory behavior).