Home Why The Newsroom is Good News for Republicans
Home Why The Newsroom is Good News for Republicans

Why The Newsroom is Good News for Republicans

The last time Aaron Sorkin had a high-profile political television show, liberals used it to cope with the decline and fall of the Clinton Presidency and the long winter of the Bush Years. The West Wing was a coping mechanism for the death of a liberal dream, and so is The Newsroom. Both are an escape into fantasy to avoid dealing with the harsh reality.

On an episode of Seinfeld, George is stung by an insult but is unable to think of a retort, so he spends days trying to come up with the perfect comeback, until he finally thinks of it and travels around the country to get the chance to deliver it. The Newsroom, set in the past, and jumping in right before the political balance tilted toward the Republicans in the mid-term elections, is the same thing.

The Newsroom is Sorkin's sad attempt to win an argument by rewriting history and coming up with all the comebacks that his side couldn't think of two years ago. It's the sad and pathetic spectacle of an ideology creating its own fantasy version of its reality in which it won the argument.

Unlike The West Wing, The Newsroom isn't set in an alternate world in which the universe innately favors liberals. Instead it's set in an alternate version of the past, in which liberals were smarter and won all the arguments that they ended up losing here. And the existence of The Newsroom is the greatest possible concession that the argument was lost.

There's no reason for Republicans to look down on The Newsroom. It's a safer outlet for liberal anger than Occupy Wall Street. It's a miniature universe in which they are smarter, nobler and better than everyone else. Children have fantasy worlds like that. There's no reason that liberals shouldn't. Not only does it give them the security of believing that they really were superior, but it prevents them from learning any useful lessons from their defeat.

It's never a bad thing when your enemies escape into a delusional state, to a world of their making in which they are in complete control of everything. It makes it more likely that they will cede at least some control over the real world. And it's not only an admission of defeat, but of emotional and mental fragility. Adults don't need to build fantasy worlds to escape the effects of their failures on their precious self-esteem. That's for overgrown children who are used to getting trophies for just showing up.

The Newsroom is the kid that everyone hated losing his race for class president and creating a fantasy world in which he won the election and everyone cheered his obnoxious tantrums. It may not be good for him, but it's good for us because it means he hasn't learned to win. All that he's learned to do is manage the emotional experience of defeat through delusional tantrums of superiority.

Propaganda that tells you that you won, when you actually lost, is corrosive; it inhibits any serious self-evaluation. And without some soul-searching and error-checking, the same mistakes are bound to be repeated over and over again. Seventeen years after the Clinton Presidency was nearly torpedoed by universal health care, his party's successor, who defeated the woman who shaped the initiative, went down the same road, but with much less caution.

That kind of stupidity would not have been possible if the winners had learned any lessons from the past. But the winners had been living on The West Wing, in which liberal speeches and principles are all it takes to win. Where the good guys never lose, because the scripts are written that way. Rather than living in the real Clinton Years, many of them had been living in the imaginary version. Now, rather than remembering the actual Obama Years, they will remember The Newsroom's fictional version of them. And they will make the same mistakes all over again. 

HBO, which has invested big in liberal propaganda, knows exactly what it's doing. At a time when customers are dropping cable, particularly the high-priced packages, it is insulating itself with a built-in audience. Forget MSNBC or Comedy Central with their tantrums against real-life Republicans, on HBO, liberal audiences can go on safe safaris to see experienced liberal great hunters taking potshots at imaginary Republicans.

When the real-life Republicans are just too scary, the good liberal viewer flees to HBO, where the Republicans are just waiting to be deflated with a smarmy line about school prayer, science or terrorism. Just as the family sitcom reassured viewers about the state of the nuclear family, HBO reassures liberals about the state of their ideology, nurturing them and coddling them, until they are ready to reemerge at the next political rally.

The message that The Newsroom feeds to liberals is that they didn't have enough self-esteem, they weren't as self-confident, as abrasive and as biased as they should have been last time around. And that's a welcome thing, not for anyone who still harbors hope that a sane two-party system will prevail, but those who want to see liberals destroy themselves, their institutions and their ambitions.

If liberals acted in public life the way that they do on The Newsroom, they would be signing their own political death warrant. The Newsroom's message to the media is to be more openly biased. And who wouldn't welcome that? The media's last shreds of credibility come from its pretense that it is neutral. The day that news anchors routinely take to the air, announce their political affiliation and begin to rant about Republicans is the day that the last pieces of their empire come crumbling down. The day that every news channel is MSNBC is the day that they will all have to divide the MSNBC audience among themselves.

The liberal media is already following that path, and their newspapers, magazines and news shows are turning into ghettos because of it. The Newsroom berates them for not following it quickly enough. And the faster they go down that road, the less influence they will retain. If I wanted to destroy the liberal media, I would encourage them to follow The Newsroom's model. And while they won't listen to me... they will listen to Aaron Sorkin.

The real topic of The Newsroom is egotism and it's the perfect mirror for the destruction of the administrations of two egotistical Democratic chiefs who self-destructed because they had as little impulse control as The Newsroom's protagonist. The celebration of self-destructive behavior is self-destructive and it programs the Democrats to seek out the next cycle of egotistical, self-destructive politicians.

A failure to recognize one's own flaws means an inability to change. Hell is being trapped in one's own flaws forever. And that is The Newsroom, it is a hell that liberals have made for themselves, a Sisyphean exercise in which they roll the boulder endlessly up the hill, only to be flattened by it, and then resume the same exercise without having learned anything in the process except to push the boulder even faster next time.

The Newsroom reeks of its own smugness. It is entirely self-reflective. Its politics are a matter of identity. And that identity creates its own universe. There are universes like that already in cloistered urban centers, in ideologically-gated communities and in academia. And when their inhabitants mistake the larger world outside as being no different than their universe, the contest between the ideology and the world begins.

To the sociopath, the universe is a solipsistic place. So too the modern liberal sees the world as a place on which to force his own sense of internal identity. He reacts to the "otherness" of those who don't share his political identity by trying to stamp them out. If he can't physically destroy them, then he retreats to physical and mental enclaves where he destroys them intellectually over and over again, fighting battles against legions of ghosts and shadows, mocking and ridiculing them out of existence, until he is forced to face them in real life and attempts to treat real people the way that he treated the imaginary obstacles to his ego.

With The Newsroom, the cycle continues as, anticipating defeat, liberals retreat to a safe place in an imaginary version of the past, in which they can line up all their enemies and knock them down like rows of toy soldiers, in which everything seems clear and certain, and their side always wins. Their hibernation is a good sign. It's a sign that they are afraid they are about to lose.

Bears leave hibernation in the spring, but, since the spring, liberals have begun crawling into their own caves, arranging the cushions, closing the blinds and shutting away the world, for the better world glowing from their television screens.





Comments

  1. Yes, it is a very interesting piece.

    Now if we could convince all conservatives to unplug their TV sets the world would be a much more intelligent, and happy place.

    I've not watched TV in many years, and when I relocated last September I did not even purchase a TV set for my new home.

    I haven't missed it one bit. It's a rather liberating experience.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Following the logic of the post, though, we should be watching these shows to keep the bubble floating!

    Value to shareholders doesn't seem to be high on the priority list of these organisations. Do GE still sink money into the NBC money pit?

    There is a kerfuffle in Australia at the moment because a (politically conservative) mining magnate has bought a big load of shares in a rather leftist newspaper chain, and the luvies don't want to let her have representation on the board. They'd rather go down the drain.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous26/6/12

    Dear Mr. Greenberg,
    While the premise of your article is sound, I am just amazed that how few conservative pundits have explicitly stated that Sorkin's political shows are liberal fantasies whose aim is to make those liberals feel like winners -- no matter the election returns. And your point that such shows allow liberals to overlook their own faults and foibles is excellent. In which regard, I have been telling my friends for the last 12 years that the liberal bias of the media is a two-edged sword: yes, 20 years ago, when the media had a thin veneer of objectivity, I believe that the liberal bias hurt the GOP; now, after Rathergate, NBC doctoring the Zimmerman tape, I am beginning to believe that the media, despite their best efforts, is harming the Dems.

    But I have to disagree with you about Bill Clinton being self-destructive (of course, Obama is). What got Bill Clinton in trouble was not having sex with an intern, but not listening to his lawyers. I know many top lawyers, sharks who prey on sharks, and every one has said the same thing: they would have told Clinton to settle with Paula Jones, to pay her 500k, 1 million, even more. so as not to have to take the stand (leak to the media: Clinton had nothing to do with Paula Jones, but he is no saint, and so had to pay her off to avoid testifying about other things; actually, this is almost believable). So why didn't he, a very intelligent man - and a lawyer, listen to such sound advice? Because Hillary*, she-demon and castrating harpy, would NOT hear of it! Yes, she almost did him in re her healthcare plan in 93-94, and she almost did him in re Monica Lewinksy. By the way: I consider Clinton to have been a poor to mediocre President, but light years better than LBJ, Carter, and Barack Hussein Obama.

    Sidenote: I do not quite what to make of both Obama and Hillary fawning over the Moslem Brotherhood, save that it makes me sick. Nor do I understand why Obama considers Erdogan, P.M. of Turkey, such a good friend (CondI Rice and the excrrable Karen Jones fell for him too), when the man is both anti U.S. -- and viciously anti-Semitic. 25 years ago, I spent two months traveling around Turkey -- and loved it. Whenever I engaged a Turk, especially those on the General Staff (Reagan was still President, so I had some political connections at the time),in serious conversation, I would volunteer that I was Jewish; I read people well, and not once did I feel any negative feedback for my being Jewish (I can't say the same of Greece in the late 6o's, or at the Oxbridge High Tables even to this very day). Alas, today I would not even set foot in Van or Diyarbakir, let alone Konya [In many ways the religious capital of Turkey; it contains Rumi's (Mevlana's) tomb, and is the headquarters of the Dervish order. the Dervishes took to me, and allowed me to watch their dancers -- it was wonderful; they also asked to me to be a judge in Turkey's national riddle contest (I speak no Turkish!)]. In re my questioning why Obama is so friendly with Erdogan, I am being a little disingenuous: I believe that one bond between them is a hatred of Jews and Israel.

    Respectfully, Parchellan


    *When I publish a book of political poems, I shall be sure to send you my poem about Hillary. Yes, you are wise to the ways of the world -- still, it will shock you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is an interesting article, but also on a personal note, a very sad one for me.

    The Hollywood elite liberals do want to have the last word and revise history. They want to create a world that does not exist. Well, only in their imaginations.

    Why do they persist? For all of the reasons you cite but also another--revenge. A newspaper editor (offline) had a public dispute over a stupid situation that was his fault. It was nothing and something a normal person would have pitched a fit for a time and let it go.

    He didn't. The explanation? "But I own a newspaper." He could keep it going on and on for as long as he pleased. That's the advantage of having control over the media.

    Then again, there's a saying that freedom of the press exists only for those who own the presses. B'H the Internet has changed things.

    Virtually everyone owns a news outlet.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sad parts of your brilliant article:


    "On an episode of Seinfeld, George is stung by an insult but is unable to think of a retort, so he spends days trying to come up with the perfect comeback, until he finally thinks of it and travels around the country to get the chance to deliver it"

    I agree with you about the liberals trying to get revenge for insults and search for places to deliver their messages to get back at people/cultures/political parties.

    From a Conservative perspective...sigh. Sometimes it is impossible to get your message out and do search for someone to listen.

    Or you can sit back and pretend the country is the same just because it looks the same.

    ReplyDelete
  6. daniel, awesome post! all art and media can be traced to politics. you've laid out an excellent analysis of the liberal motive for faux-entertainment. you have a knack for showing how truly linked - in dialogue, art, actions, etc. - we all are in this world. your posts are compelling because you underscore the threaded patterns. you have a gift, that's for sure!

    i am heartened by the concept of the left-leaning media engine imploding. they may have to go back to basics and actually do their job as reporters. what a dream!

    btw, thanks for linking my recent post! :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous26/6/12

    "Now if we could convince all conservatives to unplug their TV sets"

    I gave away my TV 2 years ago. I can access garbage on the Internet. Who needs a television.

    Keliata, Liberals DO live in a fantasy world. They live in a fantasy theoretical world where everyone is equal. Where every body gets there "fair share." Where all Israel has to do is really want peace enough to sit down with murderers and talk real nice. Maybe give them a token concession. Then everything can be wrapped up in 30 minutes. And voila! Peace will break out all over the world! See how easy it is?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous26/6/12

    Rush Limbaugh brought me here

    ReplyDelete
  9. Great article. Seems that even Rush agrees!

    http://midnightwatcher.wordpress.com

    ReplyDelete
  10. MissVickAZ26/6/12

    Nice job, Greenfield. You made it on Rush. May there be many more days for you just like this one.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Wow--congrats on having Rush read your article on the air just now!

    Can't believe he'd not heard about you before, but I'll bet he's going to become a fan.

    You are perspicacity plus!

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Redwine26/6/12

    I can't believe that it took so much time for Rush to find you. Glad that he did. Excellent observations on liberal media propaganda.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous26/6/12

    I don't know how many people will visit your blog today, but as many as 20 million people just heard this post read on the radio.

    That's because Rush Limbaugh gave this post a dramatic reading. From what I can tell, he only skipped over about two paragraphs, so he seems to agree whole heartedly both with your review of the show and your view about liberalism in general. Congrats. -- SCOTT

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous26/6/12

    Rush brought me here too

    ReplyDelete
  15. Great analysis of Liberal Hollywood.

    http://johngaltreport.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous26/6/12

    My website, "A Hollywood Republican" had a similar article dealing with "The Newsroom" yesterday only from a different viewpoint. Check it out at:

    http://www.hollywoodrepublican.net/2012/06/hbo-has-a-new-soapbox/

    ReplyDelete
  17. Welcome everyone and thanks

    it's a great honor to have my article read by Rush

    ReplyDelete
  18. NeeNee26/6/12

    Daniel, you need to consider compiling these brilliant essays into a book. Along with David Horowitz and Jonah Goldberg, you write cogently on a variety of world political topics. I would personally feel armed to the hilt with such a book, ready to take on liberalism with new vigor.

    And yes, sometimes it takes Rush awhile to "get up to speed" (as he is wont to say) when it comes to discovering new conservative authors.

    ReplyDelete
  19. A most excellent article! I found you from Rush's site as well.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Anonymous26/6/12

    Congrats on Rush's reading of your newsroom review today. Have been reading you for several years. Just clicked on the Amazon Kindle link and am disappointed that as a Canadian I can't subscribe to your blog. Lots of us up here admire you Daniel, for so many reasons. Thank you for what we learn from your generous sharing of your point of view.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Harry Pate26/6/12

    Wow!

    What a great study on Liberals' mindset.

    To use Rush's phrase in reverse: "I hope Sorkin SUCCEEDS" in cheer-leading the real life media commit a harakiri.

    All Conservatives who has HBO on their TV should flock to "The Newsroom" and give artificially high rating.
    An excited Sorkin would cheer-lead the real media with more enthusiasm.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Kol HaKavod Daniel! As someone who truly has been a long-time reader of your blog I can say that your recognition and praise doesn't come as a surprise in the least:)

    Your words have the beauty and strenth and truth to make the American Eagle soar proudly once again.

    Toda raba:) :) :) :) :)

    ReplyDelete
  23. Hmm I'm not sure why that is. But it seems like Kindle blogs are only open for the US and UK. It's Amazon's decision not mine. If there's an alternative way to do it, I would love to.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Anonymous26/6/12

    Rush Limbaugh turned me on to this too. It's really a great analysis. Conservatives sense that something like this is at work with liberals but your post ties the different elements all together in a very insightful way. Congrats.

    ReplyDelete
  25. My wife are big fans and just tickled spitless Rush read your essay today. I link your pieces all the time but never get any response which makes me fear that no one is paying attention, or worse - they don't care!

    Congratulations! You couldn't hope for any more exposure than today.

    Keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete
  26. penfold26/6/12

    I came for Rush.

    I'll stay for the writing.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Penfold, that's the perfect comment.

    Anon, thank you

    MJ, I think that sometimes too, but then surprisingly something like this happens

    ReplyDelete
  28. Anonymous26/6/12

    I am so glad to discover in the comment section that Rush has found you. I have posted your blog on my facebook many times, almost never a response. Like one of the posts above, no one is reading them, or they just don't care. Keep on writing, you are living up to your name! Shalom.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Scott Lindholm26/6/12

    Excellent post. I met these people years ago as a debater in high school and college, the ones that live in the world of fiat vs. common sense or economic realities.

    I'm halfway through vol. 4 of Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson ("The Passage of Power"), and it makes me so sad to see how the Democratic party devolved into what it is today, one based on class warfare and envy. I strongly suspect that many Democrats of that era, particularly JFK, most likely RFK, LBJ, Richard Russell and others would be completely lost with what the Democrat Party is today.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Sultan, thanks to your excellent writing and the discovery of such by Rush, you'll likely be catapulted into becoming the "Tom Paine" of conservative America. A justified position!

    ReplyDelete
  31. Anonymous27/6/12

    Just visited your site after it was featured by Rush. Love your work and just bookmarked it. Hope to keep up on your latest pieces.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Anonymous27/6/12

    What you yearn to find when you read a piece is "insight". It's the most rare of commodities. This article had it in industrial quantities.

    Then, if you really get lucky, you find that the "insight" is delivered in a package that includes a forceful writing style, with wit, focus, economy and without pretension. We got all that too.

    I'm British and write for a couple of football (soccer, to you Yanks) blogs and my pen-name is Churchill. I mention this only to explain that I am using the anonymous route to post this because I'm not sure I can get any of the other routes to work and I really did want to come on here and congratulate you.

    And, yes, I came here via Rush.

    Churchill

    ReplyDelete
  33. Anonymous27/6/12

    Excellent article! You hit all the right points; liberals ARE children, intolerant of intellectual diversity, self absorbed, and delusional. And the line about splitting the MsNBC viewership? That's exactly what happened to CNN.

    If you think liberals are going to be holed up in their woman-caves glued to HBO, just wait until Obama is shellacked in November. They'll be trying to re-write Carter II as some sort of heroic crusader brought down by evil corporations and, of course, racism. HBO will be tripping over themselves to produce such a fantasy in 2013.

    ReplyDelete
  34. Another home run Daniel.

    I think you are going to need more bandwith after yrsterday.

    Our friends over at the freep have the Rush transcript up too.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Another home run Daniel.

    I think you are going to need more bandwith after yrsterday.

    Our friends over at the freep have the Rush transcript up too.

    ReplyDelete
  36. anon, thank you

    Scott, the Dems were always corrupt but under the influence of the left, they fused that corruption with radical politics whose goal was the transformation/destruction of the country, for a truly toxic mix

    Churchill, thank you. That's high praise indeed. Does Rush air in the UK?

    Paul, last time around when Bush won the Times was running articles on their need for therapy after.

    mmercier, thank you, for now Google provides my bandwidth

    ReplyDelete
  37. Anonymous27/6/12

    Daniel, Yes, Rush is available in the UK and I've been a subscriber for about 7/8 years.

    Like Rush, I first read your stuff this week, and can't really understand why it never got on my radar sooner. I've just read "The Cult of Obama" and once again I am mightily impressed. It is, at least, as good as the two pieces that followed it and the perceptive quality of the notions contained in it are enormously revealing.

    Sorry to keep blowing smoke up your ass, old boy. I'll try to be more retrained henceforth, but I can't issue a guarantee with this.

    Churchill

    ReplyDelete
  38. The internet is a big place and lots of writers out there. But I'm glad you liked the recent articles and hope you'll stick around even when the occasional article isn't to your taste. I try to do a lot of different things.

    ReplyDelete
  39. Anonymous27/6/12

    aren't you doing the same thing because Obama won?

    ReplyDelete
  40. Rush sent me too. I liked it, bookmarked it, and will definitely be back.

    ReplyDelete
  41. Well said. Much better than I did here:

    Sorkin Follies

    All I did was dissect the trailer with some facts. I

    ReplyDelete
  42. Oh, I have been reading you for years, you are one of favorites, you offer so much insight it is remarkable. But even for you, this one is a stunner.

    ReplyDelete
  43. Thank you Jeanne, glad you're still with us

    ReplyDelete
  44. Anonymous27/6/12

    The liberals are playing a long term game here like they did with infiltrating and subverting education. They produce tv shows,movies and books that mix historical facts with their skewed versions of the truth. They know that over time people wil mix what they've seen on the news with what they've seen on the sitcoms. Many people will swear that Sarah Palin said something they saw spoken by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live.
    How long will it be before teachers are showing The Newsroom in history class?

    ReplyDelete
  45. I'm sure they're probably already showing it in journalism classes. But culture has always been their weapon. Common sense has been ours.

    ReplyDelete
  46. 17R3W29/6/12

    When I came across this article in Google News, I assumed it would address the topic of Jeff Daniels' roles as the Republican protagonist; Will McAvoy.

    Aaron Sorkin spent time at Fox News* to research the show and the it takes Will McAvoy less than 5 minutes to ask "if liberals are so smart why do they lose so often?". ****

    I was hoping to see if Daniel Greenfield thought Will McAvoy was a good (albeit moderate ***) Republican role model, or just a failed liberal attempt at writing one.

    And yet, Daniel Greenfield addresses none of that. In fact, he almost seems to ignore the issue. Instead the article is just a (not so thinly veiled) insult to liberals. This would be fine if Greenfield actually used an example from the show, but other then mentioning it's set in 2010**, and the mention of impulse control, there is very little about "the newsroom" in an article about "the newsroom".

    I have little faith that Greenfield actually watched the show, he demonizes. That's the real reflection of today's medium, judge first, ask questions later (if at all).

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the show doesn't have a liberal bias, but in my tiny response I've been able to give more examples to the contrary than Daniel gave in his entire article.

    * See wikipedia
    ** the pilot episode takes place during Presidents Obama's biggest failure, the "spill here, spill now" disaster of bp's deepwater horizon.
    *** In one of the trailers Will McAvoy remarks - "I'm a registered Republican, I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage."
    **** That line is literally in the opening scene.

    ReplyDelete
  47. This blog isn't syndicated in Google News.

    And why would I waste time taking seriously the premise that a liberal spokesman is a Republican because the show uses that disingenuous premise?

    How is someone who has nothing in common with Republicans supposed to be a model for them?

    ReplyDelete
  48. Heard again on Best of Rush on WRDU. Congrats!!! New career in the making.

    ReplyDelete
  49. 17R3W2/7/12

    Hey Daniel, thanks for your feed back!

    "This blog isn't syndicated in Google News."

    It's syndicated on other sites that are syndicated on Google News, and I came back to the source to leave a comment.

    Search Google News for your title, it's listed several times.


    "And why would I waste time taking seriously the premise that a liberal spokesman is a Republican because the show uses that disingenuous premise?"

    One of the things about the West Wing is that the Republicans were "good guys". Sure they opposed the protagonists in the White House, but they were always smart, noble and principled (with few exceptions).

    They weren't the party of the real world who's "for the mandates, before we're against them". They were principled.

    Take for example John Goodman who played Speaker of the house turned President, Glen Allen Walken.

    On the West Wing he stepped up to the the Presidency during a crisis in which the President's daughter was kid napped by terrorists, and the Democratic President could no longer lead.

    The concern was that that President Walken was too good, and people may not want the liberal Bartlet back.

    The fantasy element of the West Wing wasn't just that the good guys won, but that the bad guys weren't bad guys.

    Republicans (on the west wing) were conservatives, and not neo-liberals.

    "How is someone who has nothing in common with Republicans supposed to be a model for them?"

    Without having seen the show, how do you know he has nothing in common with them?
    As I mentioned, he based on (among others) Fox News hosts.
    Aaron Sorkin can (and does) write people other than Liberal atheists. I always like the character of Harriet Hayes (studio 60: On the sunset strip), who was a right wing Christian.

    She went to church on Sunday, appeared on the 700 club, and even (While not hostile to gays) opposed gay marriage. Sorkin wrote her wonderfully.

    I also wanted to know why Now in an election year, we wouldn't take this chance to discuss the past two years?

    ReplyDelete
  50. 17R3W4/7/12

    I was wondering if you had watched this week's episode?

    The main plot revolves around the Arizona immigration law, which our protagonist; Will Mcavoy (Jeff Daniels) supports.

    Granted, there are liberals on the show, who oppose it, but our hero is in favor of it.

    Additionally, there is a sub-plot where Will (out of concern of being called a R.i.n.o) catches a grenade for Sarah Palin.

    When she makes a mistake on Fox News, Will Mcavoy tries to clarify here statement, and re-enforce her main point.

    ReplyDelete
  51. Anonymous5/7/12

    Ditto to an earlier commenter:

    I came because of Rush but I'll stay for the writing. My amendment?

    I'll stay for the thinking behind the writing.

    Super glad to have you in my RSS feed.

    SarahinMpls

    ReplyDelete
  52. Samspson and Sarah, thanks. Glad you're sticking around. The wiring of the mind has to drive the writing.


    17R3W. "our hero" is a stand in for Sorkin, who is not a moderate Republican, but well to the left. The show would be more honest if it admitted that.

    Your opinions are not reflected even by reviews of liberal critics which find the show too cloyingly liberal.

    The usual attacks on the Tea Party as a Koch Brothers conspiracy are exactly what people expect from Sorkin and exactly what he delivers.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Anonymous4/9/12

    Hi, everybody! *waving wildly*. It is an honor to be here. Sorkin's idea of a "moderate" Republican is a liberal. I can't quite figure out where McAvoy expresses any conservatism. Would a thoughtful Republican frame the abortion debate in the way that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz would? The whole thing is a farce and Sorkin's belief that his real intentions aren't transparent shows how lost in his delusional world he is. And, as usual, liberals seem to be free from any real criticism from this so-called Republican. George H. W. Bush would laugh at this guy and his claim that he once worked for him.

    ReplyDelete
  54. James Drohan24/4/13

    Hey, came across the article via google...just wanted to add 2 cents in.

    First up, hands in the air, will admit to being a sucker for Sorkin's writing. However preachy, he can always pull a laugh and roll a story.

    Interesting reading everyone's feedback on this. As a Brit, it's always weird hearing people using the term 'Liberal' in such a dirty way. I guess we have different meanings.

    I think the show is massively faulted on many levels and quite clearly acts as a mouth piece for Sorkin's ideology. That said, one thing I don't feel your article deals with here squarely is that there quite clearly IS a problem with the way the media represents itself.

    A running joke here in the UK is that our news papers are bat shit and our TV is pretty solid. The flip side of that joke is that the US papers are pretty together and the US TV news is mostly nuts,

    Yes it's having it's cake and eating it and yes, without a doubt the characters are over drawn but I do struggle with the fact that no one seems to be at least ARGUING with that idea.

    Tis all y'all

    Peas



    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

You May Also Like