How's that working out for you?

Remember how the Reagan administration became a laughingstock for allegedly trying to classify ketchup as a vegetable?

This week, the Obama administration warned that Cheerios are a drug. |The Fever Swamp|

To review the ketchup incident, what happened was that the Reagan administration, seeking to save money on free lunches for poor children, attempted to classify ketchup (and, it should be noted, pickle relish) as a vegetable. They were rightly criticized on the grounds that the point of the free lunch program was to ensure that those children had at least one nutritious meal a day. And, yes, they were ridiculed.

As for Cheerios:

In a warning letter, the FDA cited the claim that “you can lower your cholesterol by 4 per cent in six weeks” by eating Cheerios regularly.

It objected to Cheerios’ assertion that “eating two 1½ cup servings daily of Cheerios cereal reduced bad cholesterol when eaten as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol”.

The claims – a central plank of Cheerios marketing for more than two years – go beyond the tightly defined health benefit claim for foods with soluble fibres, such as Cheerios, approved by the FDA for use in food marketing.

Dr Steven Sundloff, head of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety, said the action was “not to impugn Cheerios”, which he called “a product that can be part of a healthy diet”.

But he said: “The packaging clearly carries a drug claim.”|Financial Times|

To get the reading comprehension business out of the way, the Obama administration is claiming that Cheerios are NOT a drug.

But let's not be fooled into thinking that the folks over at The National Review^[1] weren't able to figure that out. The point here wasn't to expose hypocrisy. They're following Alinsky's playbook, rule number five. In case you don't have the playbook memorized, that's the one about ridicule being your most powerful weapon.

Got doubt?: The very next entry over at the Swamp reads, verbatim and in full, "Naturally, the Internet has taken to the frying pan." Reading that, you might think that some fevered yet enterprising fellow traveler has almost instantaneously whipped up a this-is-your-brain-on-cheerios parody. But, no, the link is to a web video of somebody cooking Cheerios in a completely apolitical fashion.

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1 -- Have I, by referring to the NRO's daily blog as 'the fever swamp' contributed to the sense that they are imbecile's who shouldn't be expected to know their assholes from their eyeballs? Possibly.