Paul Campos gets paid for this dreck.

Some op-ed columnists are trolls. They aren't so much trying to prove a point or change minds so much as get attention, rile up the opposition and entertain those who agree with them. Trolls don't always really believe what they're saying.

I don't think Paul Campos of Rocky Mountain News is a troll, which in a way is worse. For instance, this from yesterday. He writes about football coaches and extensively quotes "my friend JJ" to help prove that Notre Dame's treatment of Charlie Weis is an example of racism. Not that it was, say, a well-intentioned mistake. Oh no. Let's not go into the merits or demerits of giving Weis the job and a big contract. Let's just point out that he's white and the last coach was black. Case closed.

For that he gets published, much less paid? But wait there's more!

Steroids are okay! Let's use an obviously false hypothetical to prove it! Or how about Vick's plight is Orwellian and we're only outraged because poor people do it! Don't care about sports? Never fear, he's a veritable buffet of buffoonery. Nobody has proven that obesity has negative health effects! That's a real keeper, because he takes a perfectly reasonable argument (American obesity contributes to high healthcare costs), strawmans it, and then does a bad job of attacking the strawman. I want to go into a little more detail on this because it's beyond me how a professional writer would turn out something like this for mass consumption.

The logic of Huckabee's position goes something like this: People get sick because they're fat. If they became thin, they wouldn't get sick, or at least not nearly so often.

The logic isn't that thin people won't get sick, nobody says that, but Campos just has to throw that in to try and smear his opposition. And, mind you, the opposition is people who think Americans are too fat.

France spends half as much per person on health care as we do but has a much healthier populace, despite higher rates of smoking and drinking, and a high-fat diet that horrifies our puritanical public health authorities, who define "healthy" food as food people eat only out of a sense of nutritional obligation.

Campos thinks this is a good shot at Huckabee, or else he wouldn't include it. But did Huckabee say that all foods with fat in them are bad? No. He's talking about obesity. A diet can have fat in it and not lead to obesity, and hey, France is proof! Smaller portions, healthier fats, it all works out. Pulling the France card is a non-sequitur.

It's no exaggeration to say that behind statements like Huckabee's lurks the idea that, when people get sick, it's their own fault. If people didn't believe this, then the arguments of the defenders of the health care status quo would be recognized for what they are: attempts to defend the indefensible.

Except that obesity is a choice in the vast majority of cases and those resulting diseases are, in fact, the sick person's fault? The obesity of Americans, myself included, is a moral and cultural failure which is incredibly expensive and degrades the quality of life. Campos is afraid that going after obesity is a smokescreen for not having universal healthcare. I can vaguely sympathize, but Campos doesn't focus on removing the smokescreen. He focuses on trying to minimize the perceived harm of obesity, just like he tried to minimize the harm that Bonds and Vick caused their sports.

For several years now, I've been documenting and describing the obsession the American public health establishment has with the absurd notion that the biggest health crisis facing the nation is the increasing weight of the populace and the even crazier idea that trying to make Americans thinner represents a sensible use of scarce public health dollars.

Do I even need to bother going after this? How is obesity not the biggest problem? How is making Americans thinner an unworthy goal? How are public health dollars 'scarce'?! Campos continues and concludes:

There's actually little correlation between weight and health except at real extremes. There's almost literally no evidence that weight loss in and of itself improves health. And we don't know how to make people thin.

It's difficult to express how exasperating it is to deal with the utterly irrational denial this last point elicits. A new meta-analysis of 31 long-term weight-loss studies by UCLA psychologist Traci Mann and her colleagues drives the point home with overwhelming force: When people try to do what Huckabee says they should do, to lose weight, the vast majority of them don't achieve any long-term weight loss. His response to this, of course, would be that they need to try harder.

Suppose Mike Huckabee were to give a lecture to 100 children of poor, inner-city single mothers, in which he told them that by staying in school and working hard they could escape poverty, and 20 years later he discovered that 95 of the kids were still poor. Would he still believe that telling such children to "try harder" constitutes an adequate response to the problem of inner-city poverty?

Wait, don't answer that.

Most people who try to lose weight fail. Campos takes that fact, one which I don't think many people would deny, and uses it to prove that there's no benefit to be derived from fighting obesity. Campos says there's no correlation except at the extremes. I think he hasn't been to a chain restaurant or a mall or a ballgame lately because there are a LOT of Americans at the 'extreme' end of obesity. Last year I went to Japan and weighed about 195 pounds, when I should weigh around 160. That's a goodly amount of flab, yet walking down Main Street USA I wouldn't come close to standing out. Yet in Japan I was easily in the top 3% of the fattest people in a given crowd. Walk into a crowded Applebee's and you'll see more 250+ pound lardbuckets than you would from walking the teeming streets of Tokyo for a month. We ARE the extreme! Campos is trying to obfuscate reality to score political points against a C-level Republican presidential candidate, and I just can't grasp why he feels the need to do so.

Then he tosses out a really sloppy hypothetical cheap-shot, and I hope that those of you reading this from the leftward end of the political spectrum can see what a poor example of argumentation this is.

And one more for the road: if conservatives agree with John Roberts court decisions then the decisions must be political! Which is a great way to dismiss the possibility that there is legal merit behind them, or that they could result from a steady and reasonable but non-partisan judicial philosophy.

Campos is a hack's hack and it's a wonder he gets to deposit money into his bank account for such efforts.