Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover

Making the rounds of Cato staffers' sites, Brooke Oberwetter finds a way to make a silk purse from Geena Davis' ear:

The dialogue on Commander in Chief is really some of the worst ever written. Even for me, connoisseur of network crap, it can be hard to take sometimes.  But there is the occasional important lesson to be gleaned from this particular steaming pile.

Last night, for example, that lesson was "How to Gracefully Depart the Situation When an Adivsor Tells You About a National Emergency While You Happen to Be Reading to Adorable Children."  Take note: President Mac said to the kids, "Now, who wants to finish reading this story for me?" after her chief-of-staff whispers something in her ear. The children all raise their adorable little hands, President Mac hands it to one of them, and she exits quickly and with minimal disturbance so that she can go about the business of dealing with the disaster at hand.

Also, we learned that when it comes to hurricanes and damaged oil tankers approaching the coast of Florida, it helps a lot if your FEMA director knows his head from his ass.

Certainly presidential hopefuls should learn these lessons on the off chance that real world events ever imitate this admittedly crappy art.

Commander in Chief airs opposite My Name Is Earl -- of late, the funniest and, I would argue, most moral show on television -- so I haven't yet caught any episodes of liberal Hollywood's latest escapist fantasy about life with one of their own safely ensconsed in the West Wing.

But turning to an earlier show that looked to do the same thing, I hazily recall, somewhere around Season Five of TWW -- long before most people were familiar with the names Roberts, Miers, or Alito -- a plot thread involving the death of the Chief Justice and retirement of an associate justice (or perhaps it was the other way around), leaving President Bartlett with two appointments to make at once. 

Knowing that incessant political squabbling meant that only the blandest and least distinguished of candidates would ever get through the Senate's confirmation ringer, he struck upon the Solomon-like strategy of splitting the nomination baby in half -- appointing two eminently qualified, respected, and opinionated justices, one ultra-liberal and one ultra-conservative (portrayed, respectively, by Glenn Close and that dude who played the creepy Amway-hawking cop in the movie Go.)

The Senate fell for the gambit, overwhelmingly confirmed the nominees, and there was much rejoicing. (Yay!)

So, the moral of the story is -- even when life does imitate television, its lessons are rarely applied.

The dialogue on Commander in Chief is really some of the worst ever written. Even for me, connoisseur of network crap, it can be hard to take sometimes.  But there is the occasional important lesson to be gleaned from this particular steaming pile.

Last night, for example, that lesson was "How to Gracefully Depart the Situation When an Adivsor Tells You About a National Emergency While You Happen to Be Reading to Adorable Children."  Take note: President Mac said to the kids, "Now, who wants to finish reading this story for me?" after her chief-of-staff whispers something in her ear. The children all raise their adorable little hands, President Mac hands it to one of them, and she exits quickly and with minimal disturbance so that she can go about the business of dealing with the disaster at hand.

Also, we learned that when it comes to hurricanes and damaged oil tankers approaching the coast of Florida, it helps a lot if your FEMA director knows his head from his ass.

Certainly presidential hopefuls should learn these lessons on the off chance that real world events ever imitate this admittedly crappy art.

Commander in Chief airs opposite My Name Is Earl -- of late, the funniest and, I would argue, most moral show on television -- so I haven't yet caught any episodes of liberal Hollywood's latest escapist fantasy about life with one of their own safely ensconsed in the West Wing.

But turning to an earlier show that looked to do the same thing, I hazily recall, somewhere around Season Five of TWW -- long before most people were familiar with the names Roberts, Miers, or Alito -- a plot thread involving the death of the Chief Justice and retirement of an associate justice (or perhaps it was the other way around), leaving President Bartlett with two appointments to make at once. 

Knowing that incessant political squabbling meant that only the blandest and least distinguished of candidates would ever get through the Senate's confirmation ringer, he struck upon the Solomon-like strategy of splitting the nomination baby in half -- appointing two eminently qualified, respected, and opinionated justices, one ultra-liberal and one ultra-conservative (portrayed, respectively, by Glenn Close and that dude who played the creepy Amway-hawking cop in the movie Go.)

The Senate fell for the gambit, overwhelmingly confirmed the nominees, and there was much rejoicing. (Yay!)

So, the moral of the story is -- even when life does imitate television, its lessons are rarely applied.