America’s New Mother-in-Law enjoyed some proletariat-free time this week, taking a respite from her pressure-filled life by hitting the slopes in Vail, Colorado. At least, she hit the slopes in between her other, higher-priority activities: chowing down on short ribs, and inspecting “kids’ healthy lunches.” According to restaurant owner and short rib-cooker Kelly Liken :

“[Michelle Obama] was wonderfully gracious and very much interested in what we’re doing in this valley for our kids’ healthy lunch,” Liken said. “She was amazing and — all I can say is she was interested. It was really refreshing to see how interested she really was and how passionate about our kids’ healthy lunches”

Of course, such concern for others’ food choices is nothing new from the not-exactly-svelte Michelle Obama, nor is her regular consumption of foods she regularly seeks to deny the rest of us from consuming. While the Obamas chow down on cheeseburgers by the dozen (see the above links), short ribs, and “bratwurst, kielbasa, cheeseburgers, deep-dish pizza, and buffalo wings…twice-baked potatoes, chips and dip, and ice cream ,” kids in Chicago are walking away hungry from school lunch lines that offer food described by “the vast majority” of students as “nasty .”

“If they’re going to feed us healthy, they need to feed us something good that’s healthy,” said Mijoy Roussell, a sixth-grader at Claremont Academy who was skipping lunch in favor of a packet of candy. “This food is disgusting, which is why I’m not eating lunch.”

Clearly Mijoy Roussell doesn’t understand that in Obama’s America, you’ll eat what you’re told to (and ignore the tasty, greasy dishes appearing before the Obamas themselves on a daily basis) – even if what you’re told to eat is utterly inedible. According to the Tribune :

CPS [Chicago Public Schools] forbids the use of salt in the preparation of vegetables or other fresh food offered to students, although the district allows high levels of sodium in the processed foods it serves.

The results of this policy could be seen on recent visits to lunchrooms, where trays of boiled broccoli, zucchini and a pea-carrot mix sat virtually ignored by students. Many of those who did take the vegetables left them on the tray uneaten.

Further, $20,000 less in kids’ lunch money is making it into CPS’s coffers as a result of those students choosing not to pay for something so inedible as that which they are being offered.  In a statement that perfectly captures the liberal intentions-over-results mindset, the Chicago Public Schools food services coordinator declared that the growing number of students deciding to forego school lunch, even when free, “does not reflect the measurable and positive gains we have made as a school district in making improvements to the nutritional quality of our school breakfast and lunch programs.”

In other words, even if the kids are bringing junk from home or eating bags of M&Ms specifically because of the crappy food we’re offering, we still feel good about ourselves for offering it, so it’s all okay.

In other other words, do as Michelle Obama says, not as she does (the same goes for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an anti-salt-in-publicly-consumed-food crusader who is so in love with using the stuff himself that he even salts his own saltine crackers and pizza ). After all, in Obama’s America, some Americans are more equal than others – and, if she can get all of us stop eating burgers, short ribs, and salt, then the only damage Michelle Obama can do by partaking in them herself will be to her own waistline and to our visual sensibilities (and perhaps to the weight and balance calculations necessary for Air Force One’s safe flight).  And that, in the end, is a small price indeed for saving the rest of the world from its own unhealthy desire for flavor, quality, and the right to choose.

Cartoon via BigGovernment