Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

This or something similar has probably happened to other parents. Hopefully it was with equally uneventful results.

When our oldest was in second grade, he stopped his mother and I one morning and proudly told us that he had made his own lunch for school that day. We did all the proper oohing and ahhing which parents should, praising him for his effort. Still, when he turned his back my wife thought it best to have a look at what he had packed.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich, okay.

A napkin, good.

Apple, very good.

A bottle of beer. Okay, that of course had to be switched out for a juice box. We then explained to our son, kindly because we didn't want to ruin his pride at being otherwise considerate, that he was too young for beer and that the school wouldn't allow it. He was okay with the explanation.

Can you imagine how quickly we would have been called to social services though, if she hadn't checked his lunch box?

The First Lady Meddles with School Lunches

You have to hand it to the President and First Lady. They sure can sense the writing on the wall, that script which says in loud and resounding letters: lame duck. Once the GOP wins big this November, they won't be able to further their socialist, nanny state agenda. Here, here.

The President himself has long made it known that he doesn't mind using executive orders and other means of obscure political gamesmanship where democracy is properly reluctant to do his dirty work. It is a lesson quite frankly which the right needs top learn and employ: when in power, use it. And don't mind about the other side's whining. You aren't going to win them over anyway, so do what you have to do. Not that we want too much extra-constitutional wrangling. But we do wish that conservatives would use power more forcefully when they have it, so long as they don't go beyond the legitimate limits of strength under the law.

The First Lady herself is taking on her opposition in other ways, ways nonetheless arrogant and preachy as is her husband's wont. Most notably, she is fighting to enforce the standards of the Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which sought to ensure healthier lunches in order to combat childhood obesity. The trouble is that the kids don't want the food, to the tune of more than a million of them deciding not to buy the new lunches since 2012. But it's for their own good, gosh darn it. They must be forced by the power of Washington to eat the grains and fruits.

Now, no sane person champions obesity, whether childhood or in adults, and parents surely ought to encourage their kids to be active and eat well. But it's one thing for parents and private agents to preach good habits of nutrition and health and a whole 'nuther for government to do it. The NFL's Play 60 program or Major League Baseball funding inner city youth baseball are good examples of the former. The latter is all too well illustrated by a shrill First Lady, someone not even an elected official of the government but rather a meddler when you get down to it, screeching that House Republicans are by some strange gyration encouraging childhood obesity.

Such is not actually the case. The folks against the new lunches are speaking loud and clear, indeed so loudly and clearly that Mrs. Obama ought to just shut up about the whole thing. Yet that won't happen. She is on a modern day Crusade, and with the power of the Presidency behind her. Let's see what damage that may wreak upon the little toads and their future.