“They’re coming after your doughnuts!” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told a roomful of conservatives in South Carolina Monday, accusing the Food and Drug Administration of launching a campaign of doughnut obliteration. “Did you hear they’re coming after the trans fat in your doughnuts?” he continued. The senator was referring the FDA’s decision last week to have the food industry phase out trans fats…. “I say we need to line every one of them up,” he said at the Charleston Meeting, an invite-only gathering. “I want to see how skinny or how fat the FDA agents are that are making the rules on this…’Cause if we’re going to have a nanny state, and everybody’s got to eat the right thing, and you can’t eat a doughnut, maybe we ought to just enforce it on the government workers first.”
If you can never let an opportunity to opinionize at the expense of the truth pass, you must be a Republican. If you laugh at facts as if they have no relevance, you must be a Republican. And if you aggressively ignore and then ridicule the legitimate need for eliminating trans fats from the diets of Americans, you’re Rand Paul, a very special (and dangerous) kind of stupid.
In his rush to ridicule the FDA for doing its job- protecting the public’s health- Paul simply ignores the fact that banning trans fats could prevent as many as 20,000 heart attacks EACH YEAR. Evidently, saving lives is far less important than maintaining the primacy of his absurdist Libertarian philosophy.
Rather than honestly examining the very real health risks that can result from the consumption of trans fats, Sen. Paul’s chosen to ridicule the FDA for working to protect Americans. Trans fats aren’t even a required part of doughnuts recipes, so it’s not as if doughnuts are in danger of becoming flavorless wads of dough. Dunkin’ Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and other have already eliminated trans fats from their products…and no, consumers can’t taste the difference. The FDA is simply eliminating a dangerous product- and doing so at no cost to consumers’ ability to enjoy their favorite fried doughy slice of heaven.
Something that Sen. Paul might want to keep in mind is that if you believe and constantly preach that government is bad, you’re going to end up with bad government…which happens to explains Rand Paul, eh?
Then again, I suppose we can “[c]halk the FDA’s War on the American Doughnut up to the list of bizarre and incorrect things that Rand Paul says he believes.” Just another example of Paul’s willingness to cut intellectual and moral corners in order to advance his political prospects.
Something about the apple not falling far from the tree, eh?
