Is Fox News getting bored now that Obama’s produced his birth certificate and the Casey Anthony trial is over? Apparently, since their new barely-tethered-to-reality flogging point is that SpongeBob SquarePants is indoctrinating kids with a sort of extremist environmental zealotry. The Department of Education hosted an event where kids got to pick out free SpongeBob books, and the Fox hosts’ heads promptly exploded. Why? Because in one of the books on offer, SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs try to use car exhaust to cause global warming, in order to sell pool admission tickets.
Media Matters has put together an exciting mix tape of lunacy for you. Candidates for funniest bit:
- Steve Doocy: ” The Department of Education giving kids free books about SpongeBob. Seems like a good idea, right? Well some parents don’t think so.” Yeah, some parents! Some real parents who are totally real! Don’t blame us for this dumbass frenzy, it’s those parents.
- Dave Briggs: “Meanwhile, the schools there — I mean, we’re talking about 14th in the world in reading, 17th in the world in science, 25th in math. So we’re forcing an issue that is not yet proven — we can’t even teach our kids the adequate math, reading and science at this point.” Honestly, it’s like, when will the rest of the nation catch up to Fox’s overwhelmingly educated and literate priorities?
- Gretchen Carlson: “The government agency showed kids this cartoon and handed out books that blamed man for global warming, but they did not tell kids that that is actually a disputed fact. Oops!” Yeah, that about sums it up — “disputed fact.” It is for some reason disputed, and it is a fact. (By the way, DOE never showed the cartoon at the event, but the concept of fact-checking has never really penetrated into the Fox offices.)
To be fair, Carlson also said she finds SpongeBob “hard to follow,” so maybe it’s asking a bit much of these folks to expect them to grasp big words like “overwhelming scientific consensus.”
