Fantasy

Frontpage magazine has an article with one of the most absurd versions of the Right's persecution fantasy. Here are some choice exceprts:

Remember the reaction when, in evaluating nutritional balance in the federally-subsidized public school lunch program, President Reagan's Administration said that "ketchup is a vegetable." The liberal press erupted with laughter and ridicule....

Since that time almost two decades ago, scientists have quietly reached a conclusion the liberal press writes little about. Eating tomato cooked into ketchup may actually carry more health benefit than eating a tomato fresh from the bush (or should we say, vine? Semantics can be so nit-picky.). The reason is a powerful anti-oxidant carotenoid in tomatoes called lycopene. This nutrient, it turns out, becomes much easier for the human digestive system to assimilate after it is subtly transformed by cooking. Your body takes in far more health-giving lycopene from ketchup than from a comparable amount of uncooked tomato.

The liberal press never apologized to President Reagan in the wake of this scientific finding. But these reporters applauded this week's announcement by H.J. Heinz Co. that by next January it would market nationwide a new green-colored ketchup designed to appeal to gross-out adults and thereby appeal to kids. So what if a 24-ounce squirt bottle of the stuff will cost 30 cents more than red ketchup! Ketchup is good for kids, the liberal media now quietly assumes, and this will prompt kids to eat more ketchup.

Usually someone is accused of being a crazy conspiracy theorist for saying that powerful forces are secretly manipulating important events. In someways, this article is crazier, maybe even a lot crazier, because it is obsessed with the media's coverage of KETCHUP. This might be the lamest charge of "liberal bias" I have ever seen.