He did WHAT?!

[azurelunatic]

There are some levels of Wrong that should not be passed. There was a kerfuffle in my youthier-youth about the status of the tomato; it was declared a legal vegetable. That was iffy. This. This!

George W. Bush has declared the frozen french fry to be a fresh vegetable.


Gods of my fathers, please strike this man dead.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I am so not fucking kidding. That is a level of disconnect from reality that ...

This man is a menace to society.

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

The one that sticks out in my mind, and I doubt if anybody else would really react to it, is More than three years after 9/11, just 5 percent of all cargo--including cargo transported on passenger planes--is screened.

Dude, I've worked at DHL for a year, and you could probably get away with shipping anything, if you did it right. (Plus, they had a stowaway on one of their planes a few months back. It didn't make the news, but still ... nice, isn't it?)

[azurelunatic]

Oo, stowaways.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

For *years* (beginning WAY before 9/11) I've always maintained that there really was NOTHING that the authorities could do to keep terrorists or "rogue nations" from nuking us. And that ICBMs are, frankly, a *stupid* way to attack us--from which it follows that antimissile systems are *also* stupid. (And this from a Real Live Rocket Scientist, yet.)

Why? Because if *I* wanted to nuke a US city, I'd get the weapon to its destination by the simple expedient of hiding it in a shipment of cocaine. I mean, really, can you think of a better way to guarantee its undetected arrival?

[azurelunatic]

*cracks up*

[juuro.livejournal.com]

I just love it when people get all incensed about the wrong thing.

There are sanitary and health regulations concerning the transport and storage of various comestibles.

The required conditions of transport and storage are different for different classes of comestibles. For instance, an orange doesn't need quite the same transport and storage conditions as a slab of beef does. Or, a head of lettuce needs somewhat different transport and storage conditions than a root vegetable.

If one who is not prone to seeing everything done by certain parties as the actualisation of all that is evil and the road to perdition were to actually read the declaration, one would find that the definition applies for the storage and transport conditions required of frozen french freedom fries. It has nothing to do with nutritional status of the thing.

[azurelunatic]

That makes far more sense.


I would not have been surprised, however, had any politician in this country, no matter what party, declared two clearly unequal foods as nutritional equivalents, because that is just how screwed-up the country is.

[othercat.livejournal.com]

Er. I didn't see that bit...Lot's of other stuff, but not that bit.

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

The tomato is botanically a fruit and culinarly a vegetable. I don't know why it would need legal definition as a vegetable, but okay. "Fruits and vegetables" are one food group, so I'm not concerned with this redefinition.

French fries are a vegetable, I will grant that. Little pieces of potato overly soaked in fat. But how by any stretch of the imagination you could redefine a frozen vegetable as a fresh one...nobody claims those frozen peas in my fridge are *fresh*!

::shakes head::

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

I don't know why it would need legal definition as a vegetable

The tomato kerfluffle was about school lunches. School lunches are subject to federal "nutritional" requirements which are worded such that school lunches are required to offer "meat", "2 vegetables", "dairy", etc. The "food group" terms are then further defined.

In the "tomato" case (which I point out has NOTHING to do with the current administration or election--this is a historical curiosity only), "tomato and tomato-based sauces" (or some similar wording) was defined as a "vegetable" for school lunch purposes SO LOOSELY that the *catsup* on a hamburger fufilled the requirement for one of the two "vegetables". I'm not sure if the pickle counted as the second vegetable or not.

Mind you, in the defense of the original drafters of the language, the intent had been to allow lasagna, frex, to meet the "vegetable" requirement as well as the "grain" requirement.

IIRC, this was during the Reagan administration--ISTR the infamous "ketchup is a vegetable" sound bite originated with James Watt. (This would be the same Secretary of the Interior who publically denied the need to preserve public wildernesses for future generations, since we were in the End Times and there wouldn't BE any "future generations".)