The president and Michelle Obama were released on their own recognizance, but ordered not to host any dinner or lunch parties, after tests revealed the soil in the First Garden had lead concentrations of 987,000 parts per million. (The Environmental Protection Agency puts the threshold for dangerous lead levels at 300 parts per million.) A preliminary hearing date has not been set. Obama becomes only the second president to be arrested while in office since Ulysses S. Grant, who was caught speeding around Washington, D.C., in a horse and buggy.

“Oh, this is worse, much, much worse,” said Skippy Limpcelery, president of the Vegan Society and an ardent supporter of the president during last year’s election, speculating that the Obamas put the lead in the garden on purpose. “For Obama and his so-called ‘glamorous’ wife to have claimed to plant an organic garden and then have poisoned hundreds of people — including homeless women! — is simply unconscionable. I can guarantee you he just lost half of his most socialist supporters. He’s a fake!”

Other former supporters were just as upset.

“This is nothing more than continuation of the Bush Food Doctrine and hatred against homeless people, people he privately labeled ‘evil-doers,’” said Cathy “Butch” Johnson, president of the National Organization for Women. “Obama should be impeached!”

However, Zippy Fruitcake, uberlord of the anti-human organization, Zero Growth, applauded the incident as an interesting possibility for population control that warranted further study. “While we disagree with the Obamas’ rape of the planet, we appreciate their creative pursuit of zero growth, both on an economic and population level, and would like to lend the administration our full support.”

The incident is awkward for a White House that has made prominent use of the vegetable garden to define Michelle Obama’s role as First Lady, and to encourage sensible eating habits in children.

(It may also do serious damage to Mrs. Obama’s recent push for a more powerful position in the White House; sources say she had been badgering the president to issue an executive order that would have the verbally gaff-prone Joe Biden sent to the U.N. as the nation’s chief delegate and install her in his place as vice president.)

Children are especially vulnerable to exposure to lead, which can cause neurological problems and kidney damage and affect the processes that typically allow highly intelligent individuals to discover and understand the Constitution and develop (The Horror! The Horror! The Horror!) conservative principles, leaving them highly impressionable and dangerously susceptible to the vacuous perils of liberalism.

The vegetable garden had been understood as an important symbolic break from the George Bush presidency, and it became a cause for environmentalists and the organic food movement in America who had urged the Obamas to use the White House to set an example of healthy eating, healthy eating being, of course, the number one problem facing America at the moment.

The First Lady invited dozens of 10- and 11-year olds from a state elementary school in a transitional neighborhood of Washington to the White House last March to help her dig up a 1,100 square foot plot of land near her daughters’ swing set. Photographers were let in to take pictures of her kneeling in the dirt and wielding garden tools.

Rumors that the press failed to report her smacking one of the children with a garden trowel for getting dirt on one of her $540 sneakers have gone unfounded.

The school children were invited back to tend the plot and just 2 weeks ago helped bring in the first harvest: 73 lbs of lettuce, 12 lbs of snap peas, and one cucumber the size of a baseball bat. Obama and the children then trooped into the White House kitchen to wash lettuce and shell and cook the peas for lunch, which they ate outside on white tablecloths. (The president was quick to strip one of the tablecloths from a table and wave it in the air, saying, “I’m just practicing my surrender technique for Iraq and Afghanistan.”)

Soon after, the school children developed severe symptoms of lead poisoning, such as stomachaches, vomiting, fatigue, headaches, and muscle weakness, leading to the testing of the garden soil.

The president, himself, then displayed classic attention problem symptoms often attributed to lead poisoning, when he failed to say anything during the first week of the crackdown on protesters following the recent Iranian presidential elections, instead spending hours and hours during the middle of the day watching episodes of Beavis and Butthead on the entertainment system he had installed behind a secret panel in the Oval Office.