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Michelle Malkin: Phony Fruits in the Obama Garden
Hold on to your hoe. It turns out that the fruits and veggies used in a special edition of the popular Food Network TV show Iron Chef America featuring first lady Michelle Obama did not, in fact, come from the White House garden. Could there be a more deliciously fitting symbol of Obama White House fakery than Garden-Gate?
Some may shrug at this tempest in a colander. But as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Hope and Change inauguration, the first lady’s little horticultural hoax serves as a handy metaphor for a cornucopia of Obama fraud.
They’ve stocked health-care town halls with partisan goons and benefactors. They’ve provided lab coats to doctor donors to make their health-care lobbying look more authentic. And they’ve treated soldiers, in President Barack Obama’s own words, as “pretty good photo ops.”
Ringers are what’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
East Wing apologists are whirling like KitchenAid salad spinners over the Iron Chef-fuffle: “Due to the production delay between the shoot at the White House and the shoot at Food Network, the produce used in Kitchen Stadium during the ‘Super Chef Battle’ was not actually from the White House garden,” a Food Network spokeswoman admitted. But, they stress, the replacement produce consisted of the exact same types of sweet potatoes, tomatillos, broccoli and fennel purportedly picked from the White House garden.
It’s the haute cuisine version of disgraced CBS News fabricator Dan Rather’s fake-but-accurate card. But this is just the latest Potemkin produce from a Potemkin presidency.
To wit: White House number-crunchers and Democratic fuzzy mathematicians have been cooking the books on stimulus jobs numbers and government health-care takeover costs. They desperately ditched the “jobs saved or created” recipe for a jobs-funded concoction to salvage the illusion of economic recovery. They’ve inflated deficit reduction estimates and downplayed doctor reimbursement cuts. And they’ve done so behind a locked kitchen door.
Candidate Obama whipped up a nutritious package of transparency pledges that has fallen flatter than a one-egg souffle. Open government, he told us, was good for Washington and good for America — and the president promised to give us heaping doses of it on C-SPAN. But not a camera was in sight for the past week’s backroom health-care negotiations among the White House, Democratic leaders and left-wing special interests.
Now, President Obama is poised to deliver juicy tax exemptions for unions while squeezing middle-class taxpayers, employers, investors and drugmakers to subsidize expanded government health care.
The liberal media became unhinged when former President George W. Bush posed with an artificial turkey on a surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in 2003. But on Thursday, when Obama served up a fake populist turkey of a $90 billion bank tax — dubbed the “financial crisis responsibility fee” — much of the press corps dutifully chewed and swallowed. Feigning outrage at the very financial sector that loaded his campaign coffers and provided him with crony Treasury appointees, Obama demanded “our money” back.
But the tax will not apply to the Enron-rivaling financial black holes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (it would “not be productive,” says a White House filled with Fannie- and Freddie-enriched advisers). Or to the bailed-out auto companies. Or to the bevy of nonbanks that have soaked up taxpayer bailout money. Gobble, gobble, gobble.
Nor will any of the incompetent or complicit financial regulators who practiced self-admittedly “inadequate” oversight before the meltdown and during the government bailout structuring be fined or penalized. (We’re looking at you, Tim Geithner.)
With Year Two of the Obama administration barely under way, even its most loyal subjects are beginning to realize that Hope and Change were phony fruits. He promised new politics. We got the same old crony capitalism. He promised public accountability. We got the back of the hand.
How ya like them rotten apples now?
— Michelle Malkin is author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. Click here for more information. She can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 11:17 AM
Sorry Michelle but for most of us you are preaching to the choir. For the rest they don’t have a clue.
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 12:34 PM
Sorry Michelle, but for the minority you are preaching to the choir. For the rest of us, the vast majority, your consistent lack of substance and crude approach is humorous. You are right there with the rest of the hard right wing nuts: Limbaugh,Beck,Coulter,Hannity,Robertson,O’Reilly and Cheney. What you label as unhinged liberals are actually mainstream America but unfortunately, on Noozhawk, there is a oversupply of your cronies to deal with.
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 12:54 PM
Local, you are a legend in your own mind. The only places there are a majority of people who think like you are SB, SF and NE. The majority of our country’s population is center/right. You my friend are a minority (except in your own mind, of course), which is probably why you get beat up so often. However, anytime you want to be on the right side of an argument you can join those of us with some common sense and a rational brain.
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 01:26 PM
An50, everythough I disagree with you I can always count on you for a good laugh. If you think you are center/right good for you. However, I have yet to hear any of your arguments come from the center. You probably think Fox News is the center of the country. That is why they have the Huckster, Palin and Gingrich as commentators.
I remind you that the GOP lost the election for President, Senate and Congress. Oh and by the way you forgot to add Oregon, Washington all of the North East, Colorado, New Mexico,Illinios,Michigan,Nevada. However, places like Texas,Oklahoma and Utah are solidly on your side. Maybe you can end your daily frustration by moving to one of those choice locations???
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 02:25 PM
Malkin makes a good point. Only it’s not the (political) one she was intending.
She highlights the fact that most so-called “reality tv” is as totally staged as any feature
film or fictional tv series.
According to (more objective) news sources, the “tv chefs” in question DID visit the
White House veggie garden, and DID harvet “fresh vegetables” intended for use on
their tv show.
However, because the White House veggie harvest was in one city on one day, and the tv taping of the “real life” cooking show was in New York several days later, both the contestant-chefs and the show’s tv producer insisted that a new batch of
“garden fresh” veggies had to be used, to look “fresh” on tv.
So they tossed the White House veggies, and special-ordered some new ones from
a high-end NYC provider, then “enhanced” them by spritzing them w. a water and
olive-oil mixture, so they’d “glisten” for the tv cameras.
What Michelle Obama had to do with the total artificiality of this “reality tv” show’s
taping is unclear to me.
Her school kids DID plant and grow the fresh veggies in the White House garden.
The actor-chefs DID visit that garden and harvest some of their veggies.
It was the tv production requirements that caused the producer, not Mrs. Obama,
to toss the original veggies.
So Malkin’s actual point should be that there is NO instance on ANY “reality tv” show
which is actually spontaneous and real.
That’s true whether we’re talking about “Survivor” or “The Bachelor” or “I Dated a
Rock Star” or whichever piece of contrived junk you are talking about (or watching).
Noozhawk readers who are sincerely unaware of the fact that no “reality tv” is truly
real should put their politics and ideologies down for a moment, and ask, why?
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 03:47 PM
Just go look at the numbers Local. 20% consider themselves “liberal”, 40% conservative, 20% left/center and 20% right/center. Obama won on the utter abandonment of the GOP by conservatives. You see when our ideology is trampled by a party we abandon the party. You on the left have no conviction toward your beliefs so you just do what the party does. Get a spine, get a brain and think and do for yourself. You make the assumption that because Rush, Beck, Vanity, et all sound alike that we conservatives all just tow the pundants line. The fact is conservatives think for themselves, Local, we arrive at our convictions by common sense and rational thought. I don’t listen to any of these guys, I don’t have to but I can tell you what they believe if they are a conservative. You on the other hand live in a fearful world of self doubt. At some point when you give up on this notion that right/left is like a foot ball game with a team A and a team B and realize as I did that it is really about right/wrong and the left is just plain wrong. Then we can go get a beer together and I will re-educate you to the way the world really works. You will be free, happy and have no fears my friend. You just let me know how much longer you need to be beat up, I’ll be waiting.
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 03:59 PM
Looks like the fault is the food network, not Michele Obama or Whitehouse personnel. This straw woman you set up is unbecoming of straight shooting analysis.
» wrote on 01.18.10 @ 04:34 PM
An50, I know it may be hard to believe but 25 years ago when I was young, immature and uninformed I too was a conservative. What happened was I sought the truth and was open to it. I read and read and read. I am not scared. The conservatives use fear as part of their agenda. I have very solid confictions which include wanting the human race to do better. I believe in helping others, a clean environment, world peace and a minimum standard of living for all humans. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, I believe in the 2nd Amendment but with restrictions, I believe there are more important things than money. I believe in capitalism and democracy but I am concerned that many greedy people will expliot it without proper oversight and regulation. I do not believe that the typical government employee is incompentent and does a fairly good job at what they are assigned to do. Public service is a good thing not a bad thing. The private sector if channeled properly can solve many problems.
An50, your stats on political leaning is very interesting but any poll depending on who takes it and how the question is asked will slant results. If liberal means what I have outlined above I think you might be surprised how many fall into my camp.
By the way An50, this is not a contest. I know many on the right on Noozhawk commentary try to make it that way. There is no winners and losers just a friendly discussion. So the beat you up comment is unnecessary and simply your opinion. Agreeing to disagree is not a bad thing.
» wrote on 01.22.10 @ 04:31 PM
Local, I was referring to the people not being sock puppets. Politicians are another story and I agree with you on that. If you look at what happened to the GOP in 2006 its clear (at least to those of us not in DC) that the GOP base gave the party the finger, much like Massachusetts voters did yesterday to the DNC.
Here we see a real movement with the real people, that’s you and me, however different our politics, we are all fed up with how Washington does business. All I’m saying is let’s not blow the opportunity for us to give DC the finger and unload crappy politicians in mass. Follow the lead of your liberal friends in New England and clean house.
Now your assessment of the current economic mess is all wrong my friend. Greed has and will always exist. It is in our human nature. It may go against my better judgment and my religious beliefs but I don’t fool myself as you have done into believing a system change will eradicate it, mute it, subdue it or change it. Greed is a human behavior and to get rid of it means having cultural traditions and values which make being greedy unacceptable to the INDIVIDUAL. We have all but eliminated most of the cultural taboos associated with the kinds of behavior we see in today’s businessmen. So what do you expect? Do you really think someone with no moral compunction to steal, gluttonize or lust for money and power to abandon that behavior because you have yet another restrictive law on the books? Or because our system is state controlled? That is the same lame logic that the gun control advocates keep putting out there with respect to arms. If you don’t change the belief that drives the values that form the behavior all you do is restrict those who wouldn’t be bad already. The bad guys, the greedy they don’t care about your economic system or your laws. They’re going to do whatever their belief tells them is ok to do. You want to stop greed, teach your children well.
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