Right-wing?

Talking Points Memo's Muckraker section has an article about what it calls a Right-Wing Freak-Out over Happy Feet 2. (As I remember, HF1 also pushed a lot of buttons, didn't it?) Here are the two referral boxes from TPM's page one:

In the first, "freak-out" is a noun, so "right-wing" is the modifier. The hyphen is needed in both words. But in the second, "freaks out" is a verb and so there is no hyphen; different wording, something like "children's movie freaks out right wing", could as easily be "freaks right wing out" - and with a pronoun object would have to be "freaks them out" - so no hyphen is really possible. But in this headline, "right-wing" is not a modifier. it's a NP (noun phrase), a noun (wing) and a modifier (adjective) (right). English doesn't hyphenate those.

ps: one item in the "liberal agenda" is, per Kyle Smith, whose review sparked this article:

And I’m sure I won’t be the only viewer who thinks that two male krill in the movie (played by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon) have now joined Oscar and Felix and Bert and Ernie as pairs of unusually close confirmed bachelors.

Ummmmm. Oscar and Felix were "confirmed bachelors"? Oscar jumped any woman who'd stand still, plus was divorced, and Felix spent the whole time pining for his wife, who eventually took him back and they remarried. (Yes, even in the tv series.)

And anyway, that's more a feature of movies always making characters male unless it's plot-important that they be female than anything else - unless they're explicitly making a chick flick, of course. After all, as I was told back in elementary school: girls will read books (see movies) about boys but boys won't read books about girls. That's why in so many of those kids' movies about a bunch of animals doing things, they're always a bunch of boy animals. Somebody once said, of the Ice Age movie, that "it doesn't make any difference!" To which I say, then why weren't they all girls? Heck, even in Toy Story, Hamm and Rex and Slinky and Wheezy and in fact every single toy but Bo Peep is male. (Okay, in recent years we've gotten one or two female characters in the movies, but it's always a token one or two...) You can read a lot into the krill both being guys, but that they're gay isn't part of it.