Fat and Sloppy

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/952dsuys.asp

These liberal pansies, using "statistics" from "respected colleges" such as "Yale" to back up their arguments!
How incredibly unscientific it is to ridicule flaky, unscientific liberals for using stats that "seem too exact." Think I'm misusing a figure? By all means, ask me too back it up, by all means, provide a counter stat, by all means, point out the error in my logic, by all means, interpret the figure another way. But don't point at it and say, "Yeah right."
I started out sympathetic to this article, because I sometimes think all this whining about fat-discrimination is ridiculous. I've noticed that people do their whining about how being obese really isn't their fault on Livejournal, Secondlife and World of Warcraft chatrooms while eating Fritos (please note that I'm blogging, am extremely thin, and used to use LJ, so powder me a big hypocrite). And yet, he totally loses me after a paragraph or two, by collapsing the distinction between the standard eye-rolls: "liberals are too quick to remove personal responsibility" and "liberals want to solve everything with taxes." His closing argument runs, "These liberals will get you coming and going: they want to protect you from being discriminated against for being fat, and they want to pass a tax on the food that makes you fat! First, they you to be treated fairly, and then they want to encourage you to eat more healthily! How dare they!" He goes on to make the go-to argument for Bill O'Reilly types, the slipper- slope. What's to stop some lazy fattie in the future from claiming that the tax on fatty food (it's just a tax on one food, soda which tends to be distributed by titanic companies and made entirely out of nutritionless corn) constitutes prejudice against the fat? Well, has anyone made that claim? Are you hoping someone will? I say, go ahead, let someone claim that. And I'll tell them that taxing soda does not punish you for being fat, it punishes you for drinking soda. You might not be able to help being fat, but you can help yourself from drinking soda.