Some people feed the hungry on Thanksgiving. Others make fun of them. Fox News host Andrea Tantaros, perhaps worried that the sweet potatoes and stuffing will add holiday pounds, has an unusual reaction to Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s challenge to live for a week on food stamps. How unusual? She thinks a subsistence-level meal plan would be just the thing for her figure. This is how the conversation unfolded on the set of Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.,” where Tantaros moonlights as a commentator when not serving as a lesser-of-evils (in comparison to fellow hunger-deniers Greg Gutfield and Eric Bolling) on the flagship station’s “The Five”:
STUART VARNEY (HOST): Could you live on $133 per month for food?
TANTAROS: I should try it because do you know how fabulous I’d look? I’d be so skinny. I mean, the camera adds ten pounds, it really does. I’d be looking great.
The professional Fox trolls at ThinkProgress provide some context:
Not having enough food to eat is a harsh reality for 50 million people. The average Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) household has a monthly income of $731, and 76 percent include a child, elderly or disabled person.
Well, “harsh reality” . . . or, as recently defeated Florida Rep. Allen West would say, “how you enslave the American people” — his description of the effect of nutrition assistance on black Americans.
Even by Fox News standards, this is hideous. If Tantaros thinks living on $1.50 per meal will help her lose weight, I can give her the names of several food pantries that could put her salary to good use. After all, aren’t conservatives always touting the superiority of private charity — i.e. “not something done at the confiscatory force of a government gun” — in helping the needy?
But Tantaros hardly needed to wait for Cory Booker to give her weight-loss tips. The Food Stamp Diet has been a right-wing meme for years, and her Fox News colleagues are all over it. On his eponymous radio program, Sean Hannity dismissed the idea that Americans even need food stamps. His diet plan? The Rice-and-Beans Fast:
I don’t believe people are going to bed hungry. … For, instance I have friends of mine who eat rice and beans all the time. Beans protein, rice. Inexpensive. You can make a big pot of this for a week for negligible amounts of money and you can feed your whole family.
And Rush Limbaugh offered some handy, Dr. Oz-type advice on how to stave off those hunger pangs that Tantaros may be experiencing. Attacking SNAP beneficiaries, the talk-radio host said, “You know what you do to curb hunger? You work. It’s called a job.”
Other conservatives, however, might argue that a food stamp diet wouldn’t make a good weight-loss plan at all. After all, as the Wall Street Journal writes, food stamps are “the latest middle class entitlement.” Just think of how many fat people are in the middle class! The Washington Examiner is even more doubtful that a $1.50 meal can help pare pounds. Hey, you can buy a Big Mac for a dollar these days. Hard work, opines the Examiner, is “a tough sell for the New Leisure Class that relies on the monthly check automatically coming so they can sit around smoking cigarettes and eating bon bons at taxpayer expense.”
I dunno, bon-bons might be a little out of the SNAP price range. A dozen chocolate bon-bons are going for $19.99 on Amazon.
On the other hand, this does explain why Newt Gingrich’s insisted that his derision of Obama as “the food stamp president” wasn’t really a racially coded, Archie Bunker dog whistle to the white electorate. Gingrich wasn’t accusing the president of lavishing handouts on those freeloading, inner-city minorities at all — he was just praising Obama as the next Robert “Protein Diet” Atkins!
. . . So Well Read. . . 