The debate over the "fitness" of Obama's surgeon general nominee, Dr. Regina Benjamin, for office is raging.
Can the 52-year-old doctor from Alabama, easily forty pounds overweight, advance a cogent policy for our national obesity without controlling her own fork, many are asking?
Should we put a convicted drunk driver in charge of highway safety while we're at it? Michael Jackson's doctor in charge of drug enforcement?
But others say the criticism is hypocritical and sexist.
Isn't Obama himself a smoker? Doesn't his chief White House economic adviser, Larry Summers, require a reinforced chair not just for his adiposity but his narcolepsy in high level meetings? (Or was his nap, shown in a New York Times photo, a sugar coma?)
Doesn't Benjamin's weight challenge make her the perfect spokesman for conscientious eating like a certain TV talk queen?
Besides, say fat acceptance groups, who says you can't be fat and still healthy?
One pundit with no tolerance for the "acceptance" movement is African American Chicago personality Nate Clay, whose overnight show on WLS-ABC radio had a large following.
Discussing a TV ad for an eating disorder that told viewers their overeating was "not their fault," he used to say, "Who the heck's fault do you think it is? No one made you walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator door but you."
The Chicago Sun-Times' Laura Washington is equally as blunt in her newspaper columns. She attacks "those lame old rationales African Americans use to cover up the obesity problem," like, "We're naturally big-boned," "Diabetes, heart disease and gastric maladies run in the family," and "We eat to combat the stress of a racist society."
"It's not about beauty, or some socio-political gobbledygook," she rouses. "It's about saving our lives."
Nor does Michael Karolchyk owner of Denver's Anti-Gym beat around the bush. Dr. Benjamin was not "born" overweight he said on Fox news' Your World With Neil Cavuto. "You don't get 60 pounds overweight, Neil, by all of a sudden having a low metabolism."
But possibly the biggest indictment of Dr. Benjamin's 40 or 60 pound excess comes from the Office of the Surgeon General itself, responsible for the health warnings which appear on cigarette and alcohol packages.
Its Childhood Overweight and Obesity Prevention Initiative, launched in 2007, states that overweight children and adolescents risk "asthma, cardiovascular risks, diabetes, the psychological effects of social stigmatization [and] sleep apnea."
Worse, to assume the office of Surgeon General, Dr. Benjamin is required to take a pledge to, "Be a role model by making healthy choices for myself. Help children be physically active through everyday play and participation in sports [and] support children's healthy eating habits." Oops.
The Surgeon General's office has been embroiled in controversy before though not about obesity.
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