:crazy:"What is it about conservatives and their fear of vegetables? And how did those selfsame politicians who purport to be from "agriculture states" reconcile that fact with their bottomless hatred of all things that grow in the ground? Al Franken famously mused that Republicans have never forgiven liberals for "Freedom Riding, bra burning, pot smoking, free-loving, tree-hugging, draft-dodging, Woodstock-attending, Woodstock-overdosing, God not-fearing, and carrot cake. They've never forgiven us for carrot cake." Some say this all started when President Ronald Reagan first embraced ketchup as a vegetable and culminated when George H.W. Bush famously banned suspicious greens from Air Force One by proclaiming, Sam-I-am-like, that: ''I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm president of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!''
By then, the lines in the national vegetable wars were clearly drawn. In 1988, Dan Quayle hoisted Michael Dukakis on the end of a Belgian endive, claiming that the former Massachusetts governor was an out-of-touch vegetable elitist. (Not only was Dukakis telling Iowa farmers to grow an obscure and leafy green, he was also subtly suggesting that foreign vegetables were better than domestic ones.) President Obama took yet more Republican heat in the summer of 2007 for suggesting that farmers in Iowa might have checked out the price of arugula. Arugula! They're still reeling from that one over at Fox and Friends, where the word arugula is code for "violent Nazi-style total world dominion."
http://www.slate.com/id/2278621/pagenum/2