The Muppets - see that liberal agenda in their ping-pong ball eyes? They're doing what the BP oil spill couldn't: Make children hate rich oil execs.
Parents, shield your children: The Muppets are back and this time, they’ve brought their liberal commie agenda with them. And if you thought “The Rainbow Connection” was dangerous – rainbows, acceptance, the gays, frog who doesn’t wear trousers, it’s all trouble – get a load of this Chinese propaganda.
The plot of the new Muppets movie involves a rich oil tycoon, Tex Richman, who buys the old Muppets theater with the dastardly intention of tearing it down to drill for oil under it. “Liberal Hollywood depicting a successful business man as evil? That’s not new,” intoned Fox News Follow The Money anchor Eric Bolling.
Obviously, he claimed, this is a liberal plot to indoctrinate kids with communist, anti-capitalist propaganda, stirring the class warfare pot to forever pit the pitiable poor against the ruthless rich. “I wish liberals could just leave little kids alone,” he sighed. Guest bobblehead Andrea Tarantos agreed, declaring the film “brainwashing in the most obvious form”.
Ridiculousness? An unnecessary broadside on a beloved American institution? The liberal media seems to think so (they would) and they even used sarcasm to express their disapproval (they would). And, um, The Daily Mail, too.
Stunning. “It’s rare that, in 2011, something dumb from the Fox News operation can actually shock – they do so much ginning up of nonsense controversies and outrages that the sheer volume tends to render it all weightless,” wrote Richard Lawson at The Atlantic Wire. But Bolling’s “astute” (that’s sarcasm, folks) analysis of the plot is “stunning” in its inanity and the debate that ensues is “painfully silly”.
So much more to be worried about in The Muppets. “If turning the kids off oil executive-ing, a noble, humble trade passed down for generations from father to son, is all the movie does, I will heave a sigh of relief. Think about everything else in that movie!” worried Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post’s ComPost blog, citing the troubling inter-species relationship between Kermit and Miss Piggy, which was clearly “the slippery slope that sprang into people’s minds when they voted yes on Prop 8.” Said Petri, “This movie normalizes anti-social behaviors like bursting into song for no reason and being made of felt.” Come to think of it, Hollywood hasn’t put out “unbiased, agenda-free films” since “Song of the South and Birth of a Nation”.
Thanks, Fox. “Oil, that ever-lasting lifeblood of the planet Earth, provides an endless amount of benefits to the America people; if children believe the lies of ‘The Muppets,’ they could grow up with the ridiculous notion that there are negative consequences to the oil business,” warned Eric Larnick at MovieFone. Happily, Larnick pointed out, the Fox News types were able to offer their viewing audience an alternative to the Muppets’ commie Christmas carnival: Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (cough – produced by Fox – cough) is also out this Christmas season. “It’s kind of funny that the movie that poses the biggest financial threat to the potential audience of Alvin and the Chipmunks just so happens to be mental poison to your child; it’s a good thing the employees of the company were brave enough to point out this fact about their competition.”
Fox in touch. Hollywood clearly hates the oil industry, according to Fox News. “The rest of America must love the oil industry, and has a warm and fuzzy feeling for corporate America. That must be why that Occupy Wall Street thing hasn’t gone anywhere,” quipped Sharon Waxman at Reuters’s The Wrap blog.
