I clearly have been paying too much attention to inside-baseball political maneuvering, semantics, and framing. I couldn’t help watching 24 and thinking about what the uberwingnuts behind the camera and the Conservative boobs in front of the tube will take away and employ as talking points.
Via Thinkprogress:
More below the fold…
Keep this in mind when you're watching tonights 2-hour 24 (from Thinkprogress):
The New Yorker profiles “24″ creator Joel Surnow, whose show has become a foreign policy guide for the right: “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” [Surnow] said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business — even kill people.“
I'm pretty sure he's gotten his wish, and has for quite some time. Again, from ThinkProgress:
The AP on lessons of the Libby trial: “‘What didn’t he touch? It’s almost like there was almost nothing too trivial for the vice president to handle,’ said New York University professor Paul Light, an expert in the bureaucracy of the executive branch. ‘The details suggest Cheney was almost a deputy president with a shadow operation. He had his own source of advice. He had his own source of access. He was making his own decisions,’ Light said.”
These guys just don't do irony, do they? Has anyone else noticed that the nefarious shadow operator in the last couple seasons has always been the Vice President (Greg Isitkiff and Powers Boothe)? And that CTU is about as incompetent as FEMA? Or James Cromwell's uncanny resemblance to George Herbert Walker Bush?
I knew that this season would be the one I could no longer stand – where Jack Bauer again sacrifices all for God and Country. The thought of Bauer in a Chinese prison, silent for 2-years, returning under condition of death at the hands of one terrorist (in exchange for the location of another), all the while looking like Jesus H. Christ, is just too much. I'll watch it anyway, but now it is clearly farce.
In one regard, the story might play out as a cautious tale of a possible future, one with wholesale arrest of Muslims, detention centers, and the promise of Bauers "not dying for nothing", but rather his "dying for something".
Then there's also the plentiful product placements, covering both Sprint and Sony products…
