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heroine Peggy Noonan has a column
this week that asks the vexing question, "Why shouldn't
Aaron Sorkin tell us what he thinks of President Bush?"
She poses this
query in the wake of one of the sillier little flapdoodles to come
down the pike in a while. Aaron Sorkin, the creator of NBC's West
Wing — while on break from his community service for attempting
to fly with a mushroom-not-usually-put-on-a-pizza — gave an
interview to The New Yorker in which he made some dumb jokes
about the president, criticized Tom Brokaw, and claimed the press
generally was being too soft on George W. Bush. Despite his insistence
that Bush is an amateur, pretty stupid, and maybe a bit cowardly,
Sorkin insists that he supports Bush 100%. I'd hate to see what
75% support looks like.
Anyway, if
I'm giving short shrift to the substance of Mr. Sorkin's comments,
you
can judge their shriftworthiness for yourself.
The story was
played up by Matt Drudge, because Matt owns vast quantities of stock
in Mylanta, Pepto-Bismol, and Tums and he therefore likes to make
media executives consume vast quantities of it. When he got word
of the interview he splashed it on his page, which forced NBC execs
to publicly defend Brokaw while at the same time making nice with
Sorkin, a ratings golden boy.
NBC president
Jeff Zucker issued a statement saying, "We respect Aaron's
right to say whatever he thinks. The only place we disagreed with
him was (in his comments) about Tom Brokaw….Aaron was not chastised
by anybody at NBC at all."
As you can
see, the tone of the NBC brass was very similar to the way you have
to talk to a dog when he's got something very valuable in his mouth
and you don't want him to chew it anymore or runaway with it; "Good
boy, leave Tom Brokaw alone. Good boy." But why no one has
asked Zucker if he really agrees with the rest of Sorkin's comments
is a mystery.
Regardless,
the media swarmed, partly because the press loves West Wing,
partly because it was a slow "news" week, and partly because
Drudge has an uncanny ability to cause trouble. I even had to hash
out the pros and cons of Mr. Sorkin's views on CNN's Crossfire
the other night. In fact, that's the only reason I read The New
Yorker piece at all.
But I'm kind
of glad I did. Because it turns out the press, the pundits, and
Peggy (she's not only talented and pretty, she makes alliteration
easy!), missed the only interesting comments in that interview.
All of the discussion has been about Sorkin bashing Brokaw and Bush.
But, who cares if Sorkin thinks Bush is a "bubblehead"?
Does this shock anyone? If you've watched the show or seen The
American President, or just listened to the guy talk, you'd
know that even if Bush had an I.Q. of 7,000, spoke 16 languages,
and could explain in flawless Latin how to make the clock on my
VCR stop blinking, Sorkin would still think Bush is an idiot.
Sorkin's just one of those arrogant Lefties who thinks conservative
ideas are stupid until proven otherwise and the burden of proof
can never be met (more on that in a moment).
Similarly,
who cares if Sorkin thinks the press is too easy on Bush? Tom Brokaw
could have confronted the president with a picture of Bush funneling
a liter of Jagermeister at Yale while annoying a goat in a very
intimate way and Sorkin would still probably call it a softball
interview.
In fact, one
is sorely tempted to ask (as I'm sure many of my readers have already)
who gives a rat's patoot what Sorkin thinks about anything?
After all,
Sorkin's just another Hollywood politics junky. His opinions about
politics shouldn't count for that much (though for some reason they
do). However, his opinions about his own show are interesting. He
is a legitimate expert on the NBC's third-best-rated drama and the
only show in years to deal successfully with politics (you may not
know this, but Hollywood has been trying to do DC-based programming
for years — and they stink at it).
So that's why
I think Peggy and everyone else missed the only interesting comment
in The New Yorker piece. Sorkin insists, as he has many times,
"We're a completely fictional, nonpolitical show…."
Now, let's
just say it plain and simple. That's a lie. A big, fat, Clinton
101, lie. And Sorkin has said it in enough ways and enough times
that we can say with total confidence that Sorkin is a habitual
and inveterate liar.
Jeez, just
look at the context of the statement:
Bartlet [West
Wing's fictional Democratic President] is going to be running
against Governor Robert Ritchie, of Florida, who's not the sharpest
tool in the box but who's raised a lot of money and is very popular
with the Republican Party," Sorkin said. If this sounds familiar,
it should. "It was frustrating watching Gore try so hard
not to appear smart in the debates-why not just say 'Here's my
fucking résumé, what do you got?' We're a completely
fictional, nonpolitical show, but one of our motors is doing our
version of the old Mad magazine "Scenes We'd Like
to See." And so to an extent we're going to rerun the last
election and try a few different plays than the Gore campaign
did.
This is about
as nonpolitical as Sorkin's support of the president is 100%. If
Sorkin was frustrated by Gore trying not to appear smart (Memo to
Aaron: He wasn't trying to avoid looking smart, he was trying to
avoid looking like a brain-sucking pod-person), it's just as frustrating
to listen to Sorkin lie about his own show again and again and again.
Right now college
courses are being taught on the politics of The Simpsons
and the semiotics of Keanu Reeves's oeuvre, but we're supposed to
believe that a show which contains sometimes-endless speeches about
the benefits of gun control, the glories of confiscatory tax rates,
the rapaciousness of the business class, and, not to mention, thousands
of words and phrases like "Republican," "Democrat,"
"Christian Right," and "affirmative action,"
is "completely nonpolitical"? It's about the frickin'
president of the United States for Pete's sake.
The "fictional"
defense is meaningless. Primary Colors, Joe Klein's anonymous
broadside at Clinton was fictional too. You'd have to eat lead paint
chips or be raised by Alec Baldwin to think Klein's book wasn't
political.
Oh sure, sometimes
Sorkin qualifies his statements by saying that the show's not "partisan,"
it's "political." But that's a lie too, of course. The
Republicans are invariably wrong, stupid, or nasty — as Peggy
pretty much concedes.
If the show
has nothing to do with politics, why did Sorkin hustle out a "very
special West Wing" to address the Sept. 11 attacks?
I don't remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a great show,
by the way) hustling out "a very special Buffy," in which
vampires with turbans are revealed to be no more evil than vampires
in yarmulkes or baseball hats.
Putting aside
the staggering arrogance behind the assumption that America needed
to be "reassured" by such breathy agitprop, it seems to
me that Sorkin is being cowardly when he says such things. In this
sense, he's very Clintonian. He wants to be able to comment on whatever
he wants without making himself vulnerable to criticism from those
he criticizes.
Indeed, this
is the sneaky way he editorializes within the show itself. Sorkin
claims that conservative ideas get aired on West Wing, which
shows it has balance. And Peggy tells us today that she's often
the author of those ideas, to which I say, "You go girl."
But the conservative
ideas only get offered up to be knocked down by the supposedly objective
superiority of liberal ideas. In episode after episode, conservative
views are floated largely so they can be ridiculed, mocked, or simply
ground into the dirt. This isn't "balance," it's an editorial.
Sorkin was
frustrated with Gore for not admitting he was smart. In The American
President, Sorkin has the president come out swinging, owning
his ideas and not apologizing for them. This season on West Wing,
Sorkin is determined to make his President Bartlet understand that
you shouldn't pretend to be something you're not. This is all fine.
So why the
hell is Sorkin such a sneaky, word-game-playing coward when it comes
to admitting the truth about his own show?
I actually
think I know the answer. NBC can't admit it's running a pro-Democrat
show. Admitting that NBC gives a weekly one-hour commercial for
the Democratic party might make for all sorts of legal problems
for them (it certainly exposes a problem with campaign-finance reform).
But even if this is the case, that doesn't make Sorkin any less
of a liar. It just means he's a well-compensated liar.
Announcement
My birthday is March 21st. As a present, NRO managing editor Chris
McEvoy and NRO Webmaster Aaron Bailey and their able team of haggard
Third World child laborers are going to reveal their stunning NRO
redesign on that day. I believe this will be version 9,023.02, it
certainly feels that way. In anticipation of this momentous event
— the next scheduled redesign isn't until 2008 — we are
making some changes now. NRO Weekend is gone! Actually, that's not
quite true, the content will remain but were are going to incorporate
it into the regular flow of the site. In some ways this is tragic
because Chris and Kathryn Lopez made NRO Weekend perhaps the best
site on the web for conservative arts and culture coverage. But,
we also feel so strongly about that content we wanted to make sure
it was exposed to the most eyeballs possible. And the way to do
that is put it up front and center.
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