This week's poll from the Lester & Charlie Institute of Forward Thinking!
On the off chance you were one of the few Americans paying attention to the news in these waning days of summer, you may be forgiven for concluding that, in America, this was the week of the chicken. Seriously, chicken was everywhere. Allow us to explain:
This week, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals came up with a new reason to discourage you from eating meat: If you're pregnant, eating chicken (they say) could give an unborn son a small penis. FYI: This could be important if your son ever decides to run for mayor of New York City. (Really! Just like getting your unborn child into the right kindergarten. When it comes to these kinds of things, it's best to plan ahead.)
If that weren't enough, it turns out that fast-food chain McDonald's may have made chicken too expensive to keep on its menu -- simply by putting chicken on its menu in the first place. "Birds only have two wings," says a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, speaking about how McDonald's may have inadvertently priced itself out of competition by driving up the cost of chicken by increasing access and demand. (Wait a minute: Chicken have only two wings? Does Monsanto know this?!)
And, this week, experts dared to challenge the wisdom of the great Julia Child by telling us that we should stop washing raw chicken. We're just pushing things around -- things like salmonella and Campylobacter, getting whatever Campylobacter is all over everything that isn't a chicken. That's bad -- so bad, in fact, that it inspired the creation of what may be a new art form, the Germ-Vision Animation. Germ-Vision wants to look really, really scary. Post 2013-VMAs, however, there's a new threshold of "scary" to be met. (See? Even we can't get away from talking about Miley Cyrus and those inescapable pictures of the her chicken-like rubber-clad butt.)
So much chicken. Can any politician resist jumping on a bandwagon? Clearly not Colorado Republican State Senator Vicki Marble, who this week brought a legislative hearing on poverty to a dumbfounded standstill when she went off on a lunatic tangent that blamed poverty in Colorado on -- what else? -- chicken. "There's certain problems in the black race," said the (white) senator, referring to life expectancy of blacks and how it relates to what she thinks they eat all day. Not that there's anything wrong with the diets of black Americans, of course. On the contrary: "I've never had better barbecue and better chicken and ate better in my life than when you go down South," the senator said. "I mean, I love it. Everybody loves it."
But not everybody loves what Sen. Marble said. "I would ask that you suspend your perceptions and judgments about African-Americans about poverty," said state Rep. Rhonda Fields, in stunned response. "What we're trying to do is to come up with meaningful solutions. It's not about eating chicken."
Well, that should be obvious. Of course, to Sen. Marble, it's anything but. She even couldn't resist a bit of bragging by adding that, through the sheer awesomeness of her white-woman willpower, she has somehow resisted ever eating at a Colorado café in a black neighborhood called "Type 2 Chicken." We hope you're all sufficiently impressed.
Is this a trend? Will there soon be other conservatives blaming all of our perceived social ills on ... foodstuffs? Or do conservatives have so much to worry about in America that, eventually, they'll have to find things besides chicken to blame all of our problems on? What do YOU think?
Besides chicken, how will conservatives play the blame game next?
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