Pro tip for Salon: Don’t let your writers drop acid before they write articles you plan to publish.

Via Salon:

There’s a general feeling of distress and bewilderment to “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” Michael Bay’s latest inflated, interminable and incoherent 3-D saga of robot warfare. At least some of that distress is political: The “Transformers” franchise has gradually become alienated from its Bush-era roots in gung-ho, pro-military, “Mission Accomplished” jingoism. It now partakes of a free-floating, ill-defined, Ted Cruz-style paranoia that is both psychically dispirited and distressingly low in testosterone. (There are nearly no gratuitous shots of female pulchritude in this movie, and the only suggestion of actual sexuality is a disturbing interspecies attempted rape.) I’m halfway surprised that the script for “Age of Extinction” didn’t drag in a Benghazi reference somehow. Maybe it did and I missed it; you can’t sit through a 166-minute robot-warfare movie without occasionally slipping into a fugue state. I’m going to say that again: ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX MINUTES. That’s exactly one minute longer than the re-edited version of Andrei Tarkovsky’s medieval odyssey “Andrei Rublev,” perhaps the most legendarily arduous art film of all time. Coincidence? I think not.

I’ll play along: The Transformers are to the GOP what My Little Pony is to the Obama administration.