Welcome back to Fox Scotty boy

Brown and his new Fox friends fall for a sprinkle of satire

Scott Brown is off to a fine start at his new gig with “Fox and Friends.” It’s not even New Year’s, and the former Massachusetts senator (or whoever is handling his Twitter account) is tweeting misinformation like an old hand. This went out earlier today:

Tweet from Scott P. Brown @SenScottBrown
On @Foxandfriedns today.  First hour almost over.  Can you believe that a new FDA reg is trying to ban sprinkles on Donuts? Really!!!

Hmmm … sometimes you can just tell. So I started Googling around. Sure enough, the sprinkles story has been a big hit on right-wing websites. But it only took a minute or so to trace it back to the likely source — a post at the Free Republic that is labeled “Semi-News/Semi-Satire.”

The post quotes an “FDA nutrition expert” named “Harley Sain” (as in Hardly Sane, I imagine) as saying that sprinkles will be banned from donuts and ice cream cones. Sain adds:

If it were totally up to me, we’d be banning the donuts and ice cream, too. No one needs to eat these to survive. The world would be healthier without them. Removing them from the diet is more of a long term goal. We need to move in increments that won’t stir up too much opposition. As people gradually become more accustomed to greater government control over what they are allowed eat we can take larger strides toward a perfectly calibrated diet for all.

Ho ho! I’m doubled over. OK, maybe Brown and his new friends deserve at least a little bit of a pass for failing to recognize as humor something that, you know, isn’t funny. And just remember that it could be worse: he could be denouncing Sprinklegate from the floor of the U.S. Senate.