Earlier this month, Sarah Palin showed up in Bucks County, Pa., with “dozens and dozens” of cookies, suggesting that the state’s schoolchildren risked losing the right to the occasional classroom treat because of a high-minded anti-sugar edict from the board of education. Pretty much everything about the setup was wrong. Pennsylvania wasn’t, as Palin tweeted, in the midst of a “school cookie ban” debate. And the school she turned into a photo op wouldn’t have been subject to such a ban had one existed; it wasn’t a public school but a private Christian academy. And while Palin might have been seizing an opportunity to “intro kids 2 beauty of laissez-faire,” she wasn’t just visiting with schoolchildren but was delivering a paid speech at a fund-raiser.

Still, however shaky its factual foundations, Palin’s highly mediatized cookie showdown was a big rhetorical win. With her unerring feel for the message that travels straight to the American gut, she had come up with new and vivid imagery to make the case that the Obama “nanny state” is, essentially, snatching cookies — i.e., the pursuit of happiness — from the mouths of babes. Suddenly, Pennsylvania’s suggestion that schools encourage alternatives to high-sugar sweets became an assault on the American way of life. On freedom and simple pleasures. On wholesome childhood delights and, of course, the integrity of the family.

Image Credit... Source: National Institutes of Health.

Glenn Beck, too, has found a winning formula in mocking government efforts to lead Americans to live less fattening lives. His compendium of outrage on the topic waxes long — it includes reports of government health inspectors shutting down a 7-year-old’s lemonade stand, for example — and his argument, like Palin’s, is clear: the “choice architects” of the Obama administration, he says, believe “you’re incapable of making decisions. . . . Left to your own devices, you’re going to eat too much, you’re going to be a big fat fatty.”