brandondawson.org

I think you can officially lump the Washington Post into the “biased corporate media” category, with this inane anti-fluff piece by Dana Milbank.

Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. “Now it’s time to buy some food,” she told several hundred people who came to watch. “Let’s shop!”

The piece, which made it to Drudge about five seconds later, makes a big show of pointing out the higher costs one can often find at a farmer’s market:

The promotion of organic and locally grown food, though an admirable cause, is a risky one for the Obamas, because there’s a fine line between promoting healthful eating and sounding like a snob. The president, when he was a candidate in 2007, got in trouble in Iowa when he asked a crowd, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Iowans didn’t have a Whole Foods.

For that reason, it’s probably just as well that the first lady didn’t stop by the Endless Summer Harvest tent yesterday. The Virginia farm had a sign offering “tender baby arugula” — hydroponically grown, pesticide free — and $5 for four ounces, which is $20 a pound.

Obama, in her brief speech to the vendors and patrons, handled the affordability issue by pointing out that people who pay with food stamps would get double the coupon value at the market. Even then, though, it’s hard to imagine somebody using food stamps to buy what the market offered: $19 bison steak from Gunpowder Bison, organic dandelion greens for $12 per pound from Blueberry Hill Vegetables, the Piedmont Reserve cheese from Everson Dairy at $29 a pound. Rounding out the potential shopping cart: $4 for a piece of “walnut dacquoise” from the Praline Bakery, $9 for a jumbo crab cake at Chris’s Marketplace, $8 for a loaf of cranberry-walnut bread and $32 for a bolt of yarn.

The first lady said the market would particularly appeal to federal employees in nearby buildings to “pick up some good stuff for dinner.” Yet even they might think twice about spending $3 for a pint of potatoes when potatoes are on sale for 40 cents a pound at Giant. They could get nearly five dozen eggs at Giant for the $5 Obama spent for her dozen.

Let’s see here: family-owned farms are at a historic low, and heart diseases are at all-time highs due to people gorging on mass-produced foodstuffs that are often stuffed with HFCS, among other questionable additives, all in the name of “every day low prices”.

Farmer’s market produce is more expensive because it costs more. It’s basic economics at work. When you put more cost (inputs) into a product, you have to charge more. By contrast, when you’re a factory-farming agricultural conglomerate, you can get away with slacking on the inputs and relying on your bought representation in Washington to slant the law your way.

And there’s a dichotomy here, too: If I were to criticize “the rich” for these expenses, the counter-argument would run along the lines of “it’s their money, they earned it; they can do with it as they please”. But because of the political aspect inherent to discussing the Obamas, we instead get a piece that basically yells “Let them eat cake!”

And on the point of Mrs. Obama having interrupted the “normal” comings-and-goings of Washington……her massive protective entourage wouldn’t have anything to do with the way the MSM is whipping up and enabling the kooky-right, would it? Naw, couldn’t be!

Mr. Milbank, your piece is bereft of relevance, and has about as much journalistic integrity as, say, posting a picture of you in drag. So, in the interests of equal-idiot-time, here is Mr. Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist, in drag:

As you can plainly see, Mr. Milbank thinks nothing of flaunting American family values by glamorizing the hedonistic transsexual lifestyle. Furthermore, his status as one of the elites of the mainstream media guarantees he can pay more for wigs –fake hair!– than the average American housewife can on simple hair-care! America.

Editor’s Note: Reading up further on Mr. Milbank, I see that he is one of the guys behind the recent Mouthpiece Theater flap at WashPo. So it seems he’s an equal-opportunity asshole, and this piece was meant –somehow– to be satirical, but nonetheless, you cannot satirize that which your institution has helped foment. Of course, this piece turned up totally straight-faced on Drudge immediately after publishing.

That’d be like if I hit somebody in the head with a sledgehammer, and then made fun of them for being “retarded”:

“Right, kick ass. Well, don’t want to sound like a dick or nothin’, but, ah… it says on your chart that you’re fucked up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit’s all retarded.“