The Gray Lady Says Thanks to Dad on Father's Day

…As only it can, somehow managing to produce the definitive New York Times article on the topic: “Growing Up With a Fat Dad:”

I grew up with a fat dad — 450 pounds at his heaviest. Every week he would rotate to a new fad diet, and my family ended up eating whatever freeze-dried, saccharin-loaded concoction he was trying at that moment. By the time I was 9, I was an expert on Atkins, Pritikin and Weight Watchers, just to name a few. Did I mention spending four weeks at Duke University’s “Fat Farm” consuming only minuscule bowls of white rice, while my 10-year-old peers were home eating ice cream cones?

In spite of being shorter and scrawnier than my classmates, I was eating calorie-free astronaut mystery powders and drinking diet sodas, which were the only staples in our kitchen. My dad was obsessed with his career in advertising and his fluctuating weight, which was fluctuating mostly in the wrong direction. Every new diet, no matter how stringent or odd, was the potential solution for his expanding waistline.

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Besides being a tacit embrace of Mayor Bloomberg’s puritanical Nanny Statism (“He was a bum, but don’t worry, he eventually became a Vegan and then everything was all right,” Glenn Reynolds quips, linking to the story), the article is yet another example of another Timesperson’s assertion a year and a half ago that “the abdominals that are windows to the soul….the pectoral is political.” But for the left what isn’t?, as I wrote in response:

Needless to say, there are certain…limitations when it comes to judging a man by his physique. After all, who would you want balancing your state’s books? Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chris Christie? If you had millions of dollars riding on a motion picture, who would you want to direct it, Michael Bay or Alfred Hitchcock? Who would make the better wartime leader, Barack Obama or Winston Churchill?

Old-fashioned Right Wing Neocon Death Beast that I am, I prefer to judge a man by the content of his character, rather than the color — or quantity — of his skin. Sadly, that concept has gone out of favor in Pinch’s aesthetically-obsessed newspaper.

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