I can appreciate the fact that the right is having some trouble defending its national security policies, but the near-constant references to the TV show 24 are getting a little silly. Media Matters had a good item on this yesterday.
In his January 30 syndicated column, Cal Thomas attacked “ideologically decrepit” Iraq war protesters and claimed: “Unlike Vietnam, the Islamofascists won’t leave us alone if we leave Iraq before stability is established.” Discussing the possible consequences of exiting Iraq, Thomas referenced Fox Broadcasting’s TV series 24: “Watch the TV drama ’24’ for what could be our prophetic and imminent future with a nuclear device exploding in major cities. Having concluded we don’t have the stomach to fight them on their turf, they might understandably deduce we are even less willing to fight them on ours.”
Thomas is not the first conservative to use 24 to forecast a nuclear attack on the United States. On the January 16 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story — airing a day after the premiere of 24’s sixth season, in which “terrorists detonate a mini nuclear bomb in downtown Los Angeles” — host John Gibson stated: “Well, certainly may be fiction for now. But 24’s Jack Bauer has it right. People need to wake up to the possibility of nuclear attack.” Gibson later asked: “Is 24’s faux suitcase nuke bomb a real wake-up call for America? Should we take this as an early warning sign that something like this could happen here?”
This has been going on for a while. In September, Laura Ingraham justified torture techniques by pointing to the show. Around the same time, Glenn Beck did the same thing. Two weeks ago, Fox News ran a segment quoting a private investigator using 24 to justify the use of racial profiling when searching for terror suspects: “The fact of the matter is — I mean, you don’t watch 24 on Fox TV? They’re out there. They’re out there. There are cells out there. We have to protect ourselves against it, as Americans.”
Note to the right: 24 is just a TV show. It’s fiction. Made-up characters working for made-up agencies in made-up scenarios don’t actually help bolster your policy positions.
TNR’s Christopher Orr wrote a piece in May noting the way in which Jack Bauer somehow became a conservative hero.
As befits his training, he is a man of action: decisive, aggressive, and disinclined to play by the rules when he feels they’re getting in the way. He never wavers, second-guesses, or gives in to criticism, instead doing whatever needs to be done to safeguard American lives, regardless of the costs.
[tag]Conservative[/tag] fans of the show frequently note the similarities between Bauer’s disposition and that of a certain White House resident, and they claim that “24”‘s popularity is evidence that, whatever the polls may say, Americans want someone like [tag]Bush[/tag] to defend them in these troubled times. [Pat] Buchanan has gone as far as to pronounce the president our “Jack Bauer in the war on terror.”
I should admit that Ms. Carpetbagger and I have been watching the show for a while now and don’t quite see the connection the right prefers. As is often the case with political interpretations of art, people are generally seeing what they want to see. And, as Orr explained, the show probably tilts towards the Dems, suggesting that GOP fans of the show are missing key indicators.
Yes, there have been characters on the show who seem hatched from an Ann Coulter fever dream: a terrorist-coddling lawyer from “Amnesty Global” who prevents a much-needed interrogation; the secretary of defense’s petulant lefty son, who has to be chided for his “sixth-grade, Michael Moore logic,” et cetera.
But their population is dwarfed, in both number and significance, by the cast of liberal bugaboos: the shadowy businessmen who nefariously appear to pull the strings of more than one president; the vice president so eager to start a war in the Middle East that he uses the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove the more cautious president; and so on. It’s also hard to imagine it a coincidence that David Palmer, the wise, stalwart, honest president of the early seasons, is a Democrat, and that the Republicans who succeed him are a scandalmonger and a Nixonesque weasel who ultimately proves to be at the center of a conspiracy to manufacture evidence that will enable the deployment of U.S. forces abroad. “[tag]24[/tag]” may swing right more often than such one-sided liberal wish-fulfillments as “The West Wing” and “Commander in Chief,” but, on balance, its schizophrenic mix of political provocations still leans to the left.
I’d add a few more. Last season, there was a Republican president with a dangerous combination of dishonesty and a thirst for near-dictatorial power, who couldn’t be bothered to deal with constitutional limits in his ends-justify-the-means approach to national security. He was, needless to say, a villain. This season, Muslim detainees are unjustly incarcerated and mistreated, the FBI is characterized as abusing their power, a heroic White House aide is standing up for the Constitution while a villainous aide embraces the conservative line, and even Bauer has embraced the idea that the key to counterterrorism is relying on, instead of alienating, Muslim allies.
I suppose I can understand the appeal of the show for Bush’s allies — the White House national security policy and 24 are both largely based on fiction. But that hardly makes it a Republican show.