SIMPSONS VS. WASHINGTON TIMES?

Tonight's Simpsons was a vast improvement over last week's stale Halloween episode. The guest appearances were all excellent, especially Mick and Keith. But one line stuck out to me. It comes at a benefit concert ("Concert for Planet Hollywood"), where Homer (as an honorary roadie) gets front-row seats for a number of his friends:

Moe: I ain't had front row seats since my Moonie-wedding!

I would guess that as sophisticated as the Simpsons audience is, no more than 10 to 20 percent of them get that joke (and an even lower percentage of people my age). Anyway, this appears to be a reference to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of two kooky things. One is the Unification Church (occasionally claiming himself to be a new messiah), a weird sect (sect: noun, "cult" with a large membership) that, among its quirks, holds large mass weddings. Sun Myung Moon is often referred to, primarly by his detractors, as "Moonie".

The other thing he founded was the laughably conservative "other" paper in the DC area, the Washington Times. That's the newspaper that happily promotes "journalist" Bill Sammon's silly BS-fest At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Presidency. Oh, and they still wont shut up about the Clintons. (For an very revealing look at the inner workings of this bogus, agenda-driven publication, read a couple of the earier chapters of Blinded By the Right). Anyway, detractors of the Times refer to it as "The Moonie Times".

Could this be a fun little swipe at the conservative rag by our liberal buddies Matt Groening, Harry Shearer etc? This wouldn't be the first time that someone in the visual arts took a swipe at the Moonie Times. Rob Reiner's The American President takes a shot at the paper by featuring it in a uncomplimentary, scandal-mongering light . . . and that's about right.

(In a related note, I was thinking about Planet Hollywood's bankruptcy, then I thought about Gray Davis' ads for his campaign this fall, and suddenly I saw the future: "If Arnold Shwartzenegger can't run a tacky theme restaurant, how can he run California?... paid for by Reiner for Governor")