The Four Color Media Monitor

Having grown up as SHIELD as the good organization, it's rather unsettling to see it so maligned and deconstructed, these days. But that's how comics roll.

As for "why liberal comic writers think the movie is awesome, when it mocks their politics," good question. I can never figure out liberal behavior, beyond it's all emotional. They're happy the movie is done, and being giddy about that, so I assume some of that is clouding their thinking for now.

Like how you see a hyped movie for the first time, and your critical thinking skills aren't always on, as you're seeing everything for the first time and being excited to see it. And then, with repeated viewings, your brain kicks in, finally, and you go "hey..." I assume that's how they'll figure it out.

And they might not say much, as they don't want to hurt the movie, as Marvel really needs this, since the other recent Marvel films have been kinda hit or miss, save for the Avengers.

That's my -2 cent take.

The movie was undoubtedly intended to lean left, but it undermines its own premise. It tries to deliver a warning about government abuse of power, about how an organization (like SHIELD) created for seemingly legitimate purposes (public safety, national defense) could become corrupt, and about how a well-intentioned program could get out of hand, or go too far.

The allegories for the Patriot Act and drone strikes are obvious, but liberals want to pretend that those things began and ended with the Bush administration. They either forget or ignore that Obama extended the Patriot Act and expanded drone strikes.

And the villains rationalize their actions by citing a need to sacrifice freedom for world peace and public safety. But sacrificing freedom and individual rights for the "common good" is a liberal/"Progressive" idea, not a right-wing one. Leftists are for freedom of choice on a few issues (abortion, gay marriage) but they are anti-freedom on most other issues. They want to outlaw private gun ownership, they want to prosecute "hate speech" (defining "hate" as any disagreement with the government's policies), they even want to license journalists so that all news reports would have to be government-approved.

The Left would be OK with armed heli-carriers if they were shooting at Fox News and the Tea Party instead of at Al Qaeda.

I actually quite enjoyed the movie precisely BECAUSE it made a rather cutting commentary on our government's current conspiracy theory-esque approach to information gathering, and felt that it could easily relate to 'bama and the lefties. I have no doubt in my mind that the moonbats would happily sacrifice the lives of a few thousand for the "good of the many", though I guess lefties are too dumb to realize this movie basically calls the current US government out on its insanity.

Considering the dominance of limousine liberals in Hollywood, I doubt if the movie was supposed to be specifically anti-Obama. As far as I remember, the President of the US is never shown or mentioned. (BTW, IIRC, the president in Iron Man 3 was not even African-American.)

It does reflect the mandatory "blame America first" party line. SHIELD and Hydra are international organizations, but the council members are innocent dupes, and the main villain is an American.

I suspect that lefties are in denial. They reflexively associate spying and assassinations with Bush, and won't admit that those things could be going on under a liberal Democrat.

Speaking of Marvel movies being in some kind of alternate universe, the Black Widow is said to be a former KGB agent. But, unless Natasha is a lot older than the actress who plays her, she would have been six or seven years old when the Soviet Union (and its secret police) fell apart. Maybe the producers never heard of the KGB's successor, the FSB. But they could have used some generic term, like, "Russian Secret Service" or "Russian Intelligence."

Maybe in the Marvel Universe, the Soviet Union never ended. In the comics, the Winter Soldier (originally a KGB hit man) first appeared almost fifteen years after the Soviet Union collapsed in real life.