Sara(h) Smiles, Part 6: Grocerygate

Canvassing some more for Sarah yesterday, I had, as you can well imagine, to answer a lot of questions about what some are calling Grocerygate. Speaking recently in Rectal, Ohio, Our Gal observed, "Everyone who goes out shoppin' for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so." Whereupon a fellow in the Wall Street Journal asserted that no such thing was the case, as inflation through the first nine months of 2010 had been a very low 0.6 percent. Whereupon Our Gal claimed to have read an earlier article in the WSJ entitled "Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies," and teased the reporter for not reading his own paper, as ordinary housewives and former governors of Alaska like herself somehow find time to do. Sweet payback for a woman whom that rhymes-with-witch Katie Couric famously tried to portray as blissfully ignorant!

The problem, in the eyes of some, being that what "Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies" actually said was that grocery prices had only just begun to rise, and in fact hadn’t done so during the period during which Our Gal said they’d risen “significantly.”

In other words, another transparent attempt by the lamestream media to make Our Gal seem like a nincompoop.

On discovering that the reporter Sarah was sparring with was named Sudeep Reddy, I immediately suspected one of two things — either that he was some sort of weird foreigner, or that he was in some way related to Helen Reddy, the ghastly Australian recording artist of the 1970s. If the former, was it not safe to postulate that he was a Hindu? Hindus don’t eat beef, and beef-eating is one of the God-given rights we Americans hold most dear, and are you as uncomfortable as I with the idea of a national landscape from which Hindus and vegetarians and animal rights extremists have caused McDonald’s to disappear, and marauding gangs of persons newly stripped of their McJobs are breaking into the homes and offices of hard-working Republicans, desperate for protein and sodium?

You may recall that Helen Reddy’s biggest hit, the feminist (ring, you alarm bells, ring!) anthem "I Am Woman" contained what may be — if you don’t count “She’s precocious and she knows what it takes to make a pro blush” from Kim Carnes’ "Bette Davis Eyes” — the worst lines in any English-language pop song ever: “I’m still an embryo, with a long, long way to go.”

Or maybe Mr. Reddy isn’t a Hindu or related to Helen at all. Maybe he’s a — who’d have guessed? — Muslim, much like our president, and thus a dog-hater. A lot of the folks I call on in the course of my canvassing are surprised to learn that it is haram (forbidden) for a Muslim to keep a dog inside the house merely as a pet without any necessity, need, and/or benefit. The Prophet is reported by Al-Bukhari and Muslim to have said: “Whoever keeps a dog save for hunting or for guarding crops or cattle will loose one qirat of his reward everyday.” (And you wondered why there's been a herd of cattle grazing behind the White House since B. Hussein Obama got his daughters their Rottweiler!) In the world Osama bin Laden and Sudeep Reddy want you to live in, there is no place for Fido! And such a person is lecturing the former governor of one of our most picturesque states on the relative expensiveness of groceries? I don’t think so!

Further investigation into Mr. Reddy reveals that he formerly reported on economics and politics for the Dallas Morning News. Maybe you remember what Dallas is best known for; maybe the words “grassy knoll” make your blood run cold, as they make mine? Maybe right around now you’re thinking that rather than being allowed to try to derail the candidacy of the candidate most able and most likely to Get America Back On Track, Mr. Sudeep Reddy, since he obviously doesn’t hold dear what a majority of decent, hard-working Americans hold dear, ought to be on a plane back to wherever he comes from. I know I am!