Watching The Ed Show on MSNBC can spur guessing games. Is Ed Schultz seeking to make Xerox copies of liberal anti-Fox blogs? Or is he trying to suck up to his bosses at NBC Universal? On Thursday night, he pleased both by defending Universal's forthcoming computer-animated update of the Dr. Seuss eco-gloom book "The Lorax."
On Fox Business, Lou Dobbs tagged the book as a left-wing sermon, which is like describing jalapenos as spicy. Schultz ran that and then claimed "The only agenda Hollywood has is making money." In this case, Universal's hoping to make money while it savages robber-baron forest-shredding capitalists. Schultz also claimed the movie was more realistic than the "cartoon characters" on the air at Fox:
SCHULTZ: "The Lorax" and its message of environmentalism gives Lou Dobbs some serious high blood pressure.
LOU DOBBS: So where have we all heard this before? Occupy Wall Street forever trying to pit the makers against the takers, and President Obama Enhanced Coverage LinkingPresident Obama -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newsrepeating that everyone should pay their fair share in dozens of speeches since his State of the Union Address. The president`s liberal friends in Hollywood targeting a younger demographic, using animated movies to sell their agenda to children.
SCHULTZ: Yeah. Conspiracy theorist. Leave it to Lou Dobbs to think that a kids movie about caring about the environment is about Occupy Wall Street. He also thinks "The Lorax" is a conspiracy by President Obama`s Hollywood friends? Hold on a minute. The movie is based on a Dr. Seuss book written 41 years ago. It`s been a best selling book for kids ever since. The only agenda Hollywood has is making money. And making a "Lorax" movie is a smart bet by our parent company, NBC Universal.
Schultz concluded: "People on the Fox Business Channel should love this type of business decision. This isn`t the first strange crusade Fox Business waged against children`s movies. Eric Bolling recently went on a tirade against "the Muppet Movie." Maybe they`re just upset that these kids' movies are more realistic than the cartoon characters in front of the cameras on Fox."
That's obviously meant as a joke. Dr. Seuss (real name: Theodore Geisel) was swept up in the Earth Day doom and gloom as the 1970s began, where the Left inaccurately claimed Earth was tremendously overpopulated and we were about to run out of oil and other natural resources, that capitalism had exhausted our possibilities and pollution was ruining the planet. Some of that alarmism led to environmental legislation. But the predictions haven't come true, even forty years later.
Why would Hollywood recycle this old piece of children's propaganda? You can argue the world of Seuss is very colorful and entertaining, but there are many Seuss books to choose from, and they chose one of the last ones, one of the most political ones.
What next? Will Universal make a movie out of "The Butter Battle Book" (1984), inspired by Reagan's alleged over-armament and sabre-rattling? (The differences between the US and USSR were minimized into two groups that disagreed over whether to turn the buttered side of the bread up or down. ) That spectre of nuclear war turned out to be just about as accurate as "The Lorax."
