I love how Peter Falk in his Columbo getup tries to guess Kermit's story and gets everything utterly wrong.

You answered your own question with "fitfully funny". "The Muppet Movie" has a lot of heart, and is even quite moving, and "The Rainbow Connection" is a goddamn classic. In "The Great Muppet Caper" they went for gags, and it's hilarious. I'd vote for "The Muppet Movie" myself.

Aren't wrestling fans morons?

Kermit yelling at Piggy for overacting! How hilarious is that? Just bring the whole movie to a halt for a minute or two for a gag. Priceless.

Jokes for the parents, no doubt, but goddamn, they work. So much meta commentary in this film.

Of all the weird and hilarious things in this movie, Charles Grodin's lust for a pig is the weirdest and funniest.

I remember watching "Problem Child 2" on TV, oh, 15 years ago or so, and thinking it was the worst movie I'd ever watched from beginning to end. Still might be.

Yeah, "The Rainbow Connection" wins, but "Hey, a Movie!" is a great song.

One of the most interesting what-ifs in history, I think is what happens in Vietnam if FDR serves out his 4th term. Roosevelt was an anti-colonialist and had no interest whatsoever in propping up the French or British Empires. So De Gaulle and his successors would have gotten zero help from 1945-48 from us in…

Except that the success of the Khmer Rouge was in large part due to our bombing of that country, sorry.

You're defending American involvement in Vietnam. Don't lie.

We don't forget any of that. But saying that the South Vietnamese were better than the Northerners is like saying Mussolini was better than Hitler. True, but hardly informative.

Well, just see Michael Shannon.

Well, I don't see it. The President believes the country needs Leffingwell; he believes that Harley Hudson won't be able to hack it as POTUS unless he has Leffingwell steering the foreign policy ship. I don't see how he does anything wrong. If the movie had portrayed him as being the figure behind Van Ackerman's…

Communist cell?

I'm another person who watched this on TCM just the other day. This is a good movie, and it's a step forward in the depiction of politics as nothing but shades of gray. No one is really evil in this movie except for Van Ackerman, and even he is acting for idealistic reasons rather than greed or power.

That's been in a display case at my library. Sounds like I need to check it out.

It took me a little while to place that guy, and then it was "oh yeah, the reporter in The Deliberate Stranger". Weird to see him as an evil little punk here.

How is the President a villain here? He didn't blackmail Anderson, Van Ackerman did. Is appointing a SecState who wants to treat with the Soviets inherently evil?

No, Cooley is explicitly stated to be from the minority, and Munson is the majority leader.