Posted on 07/21/2024 10:10:34 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The Paley Center for Media just opened an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The West Wing,” the NBC series I wrote from 1999 to 2003. Some of the show’s story points have become outdated in the last quarter-century (the first five minutes of the first episode depended entirely on the audience being unfamiliar with the acronym POTUS), while others turned out to be — well, not prescient, but sadly coincidental.
Gunmen tried to shoot a character after an event with President Bartlet at the end of Season 1. And at the end of the second season, in an episode called “Two Cathedrals,” a serious illness that Bartlet had been concealing from the public had come to light, and the president, hobbled, faced the question of whether to run for re-election. “Yeah,” he said in the third season opener. “And I’m going to win.”
Which is exactly what President Biden has been signaling since the day after his bad night.
Because I needed the “West Wing” audience to find President Bartlet’s intransigence heroic, I didn’t really dramatize any downward pull that his illness was having on his re-election chances. And much more important, I didn’t dramatize any danger posed by Bartlet’s opponent winning.
But what if the show had gone another way?
What if, as a result of Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent? And what if that opponent, rather than being simply unexceptional, had been a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions? What if Bartlet’s opponent had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people? And was a hero to white supremacists? We’d have had Bartlet drop out of the race...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Wow! The TDS is terminal in this one.
Register enough illegals to make you take it.
So we are supposed to be enlightened, by a guy who wrote a TV show about a fictional liberal president, and apply his wisdom to events happening today, in real life?
The only thing Sorkin has ever written that I didn’t hate was MoneyBall and even that just sorta runs out of steam towards the end.
At first I thought he was describing Biden.
I’d say the demonrats are the ones who act like spoiled children always demanding freebies and for our God given liberties to be taken away all so they can turn America 🇺🇸 into a communist banana 🍌 republic.
It’s actually Xiden who is the one who acts like he’s still a child and is downright racist.
“So we are supposed to be enlightened, by a guy who wrote a TV show about a fictional liberal president, and apply his wisdom to events happening today, in real life?”
The Dunning Kruger effect.
https://www.learning-mind.com/dunning-kruger-effect/
was written by Michael Lewis.
And just like that, Aaron Sorkin is too late to inject himself into the national conversation… so close!
The Dunning Kruger Effect affects those who have no sense of self-introspection. It’s curious that self-introspection is rarely — if ever — employed by members of the Democrat/Communist Party/Cult.
A Few Good Men for me. His first and ONLY watchable film.
Moneyball sounds interesting, though.
From what I’ve seen, most of President Bartlett’s opponents were straw men, set up to be knocked down without effort.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.