From a reader:

Jonah,Your point about Sorkin’s habit of giving conservatives enough credibility in order to make them a more effective target later is not only his technique, of course, it has become a convention in TV. Another convention is taking a hard-nosed character no one likes and then having them become sympathetic with regard to certain lefty positions. The least subtle example was ER. (My wife watched it, I tuned out long ago). The female attending physician with a cane was a very unsympathetic character. No one liked her, she was mean to everyone. That is until one of her Physician Assistants contracts HIV from an unfaithful husband. The mean doctor becomes her greatest champion and protector. Mean doctor later comes out of the closet, by which time she is no longer mean, of course.

Me: We’re not going to go off on a tangent about ER, but several readers complain along these lines:

Since when is caring for and helping someone unwittingly infected with a
deadly disease exclusively a “lefty position?” Especially when that person
was an innocent victim, a unwitting victim of another’s moral turpitude?
Also, that character wasn’t less mean by the time she ‘came out’ — she’s
always been a battleaxe.