Michelle Obama is leading a campaign to fight child obesity.

"We want to eliminate this problem of childhood obesity in a generation," the First Lady told Good Morning America in 2010 to kick off her Let's Move nutrition program.

"We all know the numbers," she said. "I mean, one in three kids are overweight or obese, and we're spending $150 billion a year treating obesity-related illnesses."

I'm politically aware enough to realize that her campaign is all about politics, designed to showcase her leadership skills in a safe arena, in what's become a tradition for previous First Ladies, including Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan.

However, that doesn't take away from the legitimacy of the issue selected for Michelle Obama to crusade against. The CDC reports that childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. American kids, like American adults, are fat. Food is easily obtainable and cheap, even for poor people.

Sure enough, a study from the Oakland-based nonprofit Children Now showed that 37% of low-income children are overweight or obese.

But while Mrs. Obama complains about kids eating too much, other Progressives say they're starving. Kids can't be fat and starving at the same time, can they?

In the Progressive world we live in, they can.

CNN reported that one in five children are "at risk of hunger." And no, they don't mean hungry the way fat people are always hungry--CNN means they're starving, and cited a report from Feeding America.

The nonprofit Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks around the United States, reports one in five children are at risk of hunger.

CNN also referenced a 2010 Department of Agriculture report that 14.5% of households in the United States "lacked the resources to provide enough food for everybody." Kids don't have access to food and are starving, they say.

Michelle Obama and Children Now says kids are fat. The USDA, Feeding America, and CNN say they're starving. So what's going on?

Despite the opposing messages, Mrs. Obama, CNN, the USDA ,and the nonprofit groups are coming from the same place--they're just using two different tactics.

The overarching concern of each of those Progressive entities is to lead you stupid people to do the right thing. You see, you're not responsible enough to take care of your children's nutrition. You feed them too much fast food and not enough veggie wraps like enlightened people do. You need to be nudged to do the right thing.

In a world of socialized medicine, we can't have a bunch of fat people increasing the cost for everybody. So, we're going to treat you like infants and, in Mrs. Obama's case, we'll teach you how to shop at a grocery store, and in CNN's case we'll lie to you and say that children are starving to get your attention to get you to part with even more of your taxpayer dollars to fund more government programs to tell you how to live your life.

Tragically, we waste time, money, and energy worrying about getting food into the mouths of people that are already suffering from obesity instead of committing those resources to helping truly starving people in other countries.

Things are never quite so disgusting while they're still happening. It's only when we look back when we see how bad things were. Had we read that in Ancient Rome well-fed Romans complained they didn't have enough food as they engorged themselves on lavish sofas while non-Roman children died in the street of starvation, we'd shake our heads in disbelief.

But the same thing is happening in the United States, it's just not obvious to most people, particularly Progressives. If Progressives were eating ants off an anthill in Africa to stave off starvation, however, they might see how disgusting it is to spend your time fighting to get more money to pay for food to go into the mouths of already-fat American children.

 Yet in our backwards society, those Progressive elites are the smart ones that we get our information from and lead us, even though a child has more sense than they do.