I remember when “first ladies” were useless, decorative (but charmingly unpaid) White House hostesses. They were supposed to spend stupid amounts of my money replacing all the WH china and otherwise shut the hell up. And we liked them that way.
Could be wrong, but I think it was Nancy Reagan who started the current tradition of the activist first lady. (Yes I know about Eleanor Roosevelt, but she was an anomaly. Were Truman and Eisenhower even married?). And Nance was only a figurehead for that “just say no” nonsense. I don’t recall that anything she did ever had the force of law. Then of course there was Hillary. I hated Hillary.
But she was a pussycat compared to Michelle.
And thus, in order to lend credibility to a make-work project for the Queen Consort, America is now a land in which a government bureaucrat at the Department of Agriculture sets the maximum permitted calories for school lunches across the fruited plain and all the way to Guam.
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Where do you go to vote out the Commissar of School Lunches? Even if Romney wins in November, I doubt this will be anybody’s big priority. Statists well understand that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life. Sometimes your team has to take a time-out for a couple of years, but, even when they do, all the departments and agencies and bureaus are still in place, hyper-regulating away. I mean, how often does the party of small government actually abolish anything?
Did you know that when the .gov first stuck its nose into the “school lunch” tent, it was because it claimed kids were underfed? Now suddenly we’re supposed to believe they’re all obese, and that somehow more government dictates are the solution to that, too.
Unmentioned but still with us: Let’s not forget that those kids are really national resources. We need them lean, mean, and available to go kill inconvenient brown people when they graduate from grammar school. Maybe Mrs. Romney will start plugging for a federal agoge program.
I’ll never forget this. I remember listening to NPR a couple years ago. They asked a boy from a city school what he thought about the potential cuts in funding for State-subsidized school lunches. His response was telling: “I think it’s a bad idea. I mean, how are kids going to get nutritioned, and stuff?”
Indeed. How will they get nutritioned? Probably as well as they get learned at State schools.