Maggie's Farm

The columnist on the Happy Meals justifies the ban in part with the following statement:

"I was an obese child, and precisely for the reasons progressives point to: I ate hamburgers far too often. My parents, like many well-meaning adults back then and now, would have preferred me to gobble down fruit and whole-grain bread, just as they would have preferred me to play with handcrafted birch-wood toys instead of Six Million Dollar Man figurines. But I wailed like a car alarm until I got what I wanted."

I told him that no, he didn't get fat because McDonalds was marketing hamburgers - he got fat because his parents decided they'd rather be his friends than his parents. If his parents had withheld TV for a day every time he'd wailed, or smacked him on his butt - in other words, if they'd done their job - he wouldn't have gotten fat.

But no. So, here he is, years later, still wailing like a car alarm blaming outside factors for his problems instead of taking personal responsibility for them. And expecting everyone else to change to accomodate his issues. I'll bet there's a lot stronger correlation between "wailed like a car alarm when I was a kid and got what I wanted" and "apologist for Statist control when I grew up" than there is between "ate hamburgers" and "got fat".