Remember when Pat Buchanan wrote that African-Americans should be grateful to white America, you know, because of food stamps, Section-8 housing and Christian salvation? Whenever someone like Buchanan begins a sentence with the premise that Underprivileged Group-X should be thankful to the power elite, they need to be thwacked in the face with a very large fish.
This time it was Tucker Carlson who said that poor people should be grateful for the abundance of food they can eat because poor people used to be malnourished and starve to death.
On Fox News Channel yesterday, Tucker Carlson was chatting with host Harris Faulkner about the high rate of obesity among the jobless. The rest of us know exactly why this is so, but Tucker flailed and parsed and flailed some more in an attempt to find an upside to being poor or out-of-work or both. After all, America is awesome for the poors.
Too bad nobody at FNC had a very large fish handy.
Tucker began by blaming this on the Obamas: the president’s economic policies colliding with the First Lady’s efforts on health and fitness. Regarding the economy, it’s always difficult to pinpoint one person who gets the credit or the blame for the economy, depending on where it is, but since Tucker is ostensibly blaming the president for unemployment, then logically the president should also get credit for reducing unemployment from 10 percent in 2009 to 6.3 percent as of last month. The president should also get credit for adding 2,500,000 jobs; he should get credit for ending the recession and creating 10 consecutive quarters of economic growth; and credit for shepherding the Dow from around 6,000 to a record high of roughly 16,000.
“All of us should be happy about one thing, and it’s that for the first time in human history you have a country whose poor people are fat. So this does show this sort of amazing abundance,” Tucker said.
Faulkner was noticeably alarmed by Tucker’s analysis, exclaiming, “What?”
Tucker continued:
“For the last however many millennia, poor people starved to death. And this is a country that’s so rich, whose agriculture sector is so vibrant and at the cutting edge technologically, that our food is so cheap, poor people are fat! I mean, I don’t know. We shouldn’t take that for granted.”
Faulkner was right. What?! Yes, we should absolutely be thrilled that poor people, while they’re not starving to death like they did in the past, are struggling with heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, infertility and Type II diabetes instead. This is an excellent turn of events in American history, isn’t it. Poor people are almost as malnourished today as they were years ago, just in a different way.
The reason why poor people are overweight isn’t because an abundance of food necessarily, it’s because… READ MORE