Rush Limbaugh on his radio show the other day:
“I truly blame the First Lady and her Socialist push for healthy food. This is all Michelle Obama’s fault, I feel as though a part of me is dying. We can’t let this happen! Not in America! We need our food made of chemicals and pretend sugar filled with preservatives. I don’t like knowing what I’m eating. Carrots?! Apples?! Strawberries?! How boring does this White House want us to be?! We’re not Americans unless we’re eating things that are bad for us. It’s what makes us great! I’m so upset right now I think I need go to a commercial.”

I totally support Rush Limbaugh’s cause.  I urge him to protest against Michelle Obama’s invisible mandate by eating nothing but twinkies nonstop until he is hospitalized and his insurance denies him coverage because he had a “preexisting volition” to eat nothing but twinkies.  This has to be done before Michele Obama makes us all pay a strawberry tax and have to eat a bowl of them every morning!

Hold on a second.  Don’t sign that petition just yet.  It turns out that the White House has nothing to do with Hostess closing its doors.  The issue seemed to be that Hostess sold out to a private equity firm that neglected to give workers their pensions.  They formed together in unity to protest, and Hostess defaulted on their empty promises.  I have been informed that Michele Obama was not one of the managing partners of Hostess.  Ok, so it seems we should not open our mouths until we are informed, especially if we are a leading voice in the media that is somehow still receiving sponsors.

It seems that a rising consciousness of healthy eating over the years has caused a decline in purchasing of Hostess snacks, and that the managing partners bear the shame of adjusting their products with unhealthy longer-shelf-life enzymes in order to increase profit rather than adjusting to the rising health consciousness by creating healthier snacks.

What if the unions representing Hostess wage workers went on strike in order to save the company, not punish it?  What if they actually firmly believed the only way to save the company was to both change management and receive better compensation, and the only way to do that was to force the company to close and sell itself to the highest bidder?

Other companies have been in talks to purchase Hostess.  For those of you more concerned about twinkies than the pensions of 18,500 Americans, rest easy.  Your food substitute sponge material may still remain on shelves everywhere, and their expiration date is two weeks after the universe implodes anyway.  Meanwhile, after suffering through 6 CEOs, each one worse than the last, wage workers of Hostess will bear the inevitable consequences of the decisions of their overlords, only on their own terms.  By striking the company into bankruptcy, they are cutting off the head of the snake and giving it a second chance at becoming a solid rod instead.

If you want my take, it doesn’t deserve to be a single company any more.  Ideally, we should divide it up as much as possible and hand the parts over to the workers.  Let the workers take over the infrastructure and establish independent bakeries.  Oh, not forcibly, of course.  I’m not advocating socialism, for crying out loud.

If we’re right to blame Washington, it isn’t because of socialism.  It’s because of corporatism. The government is bailing out the company CEOs and refusing to punish them for avaricious deeds.  Since the wage workers don’t have strength in status or stock, their only recourse is strength in numbers and labor.

If Hostess closing is a failure of socialism because the unions demanded too much, then it is also a failure of capitalism because a CEO failed to keep up with the market and his employees suffered as a result, rather than only he himself.  This is a failure of avaricious economy, period.  It’s a failure of America’s general lack of wisdom and values.  This stuff doesn’t happen in an Amish village bread shop.

I don’t know why Rush Limbaugh is talking about all this.  When I hear him open his mouth I can’t tell a difference between him and Howard Stern.  They were both born on January 12, and they both get paid to crap out of their mouths.  The world would be a much better place if both Limbaugh and Stern shut up at the exact same time and never opened their mouths again.  Why did I bring Stern into this?  Because somewhere I imagine him telling a hooker to swallow a twinkie whole as fast as she can and then cutting to a commercial break.

Hostess failed to keep up with the times, and to truly operate as a virtuous company producing dignifying products.  The only wonder about Wonder Bread is that it’s called bread.  This Thanksgiving, millions of Americans will be ignoring the job losses at home and dying people overseas and instead stampeding into Target and Best Buy, running one another over, only to stand in line beside an recently emptied snack isle with one question on their minds: Where’s the cream filling?