The Corner is obsessed with the new Geena Davis show, Commander-in-Chief. And by “obsessed”, I mean “batshit crazy” over the show.
The major arguing point seems to be that the show focuses on the issues surrounding a female Commander-in-Chief. Whether or not it does so competently remains to be seen (watching the show last night, it did a fairly good job, but I was a bit hesitant about next week’s “the whole world hits the fan” episode), but it seems to insult the Corner that the show would dare think a woman would have any issues at all being president.
Starting most recently, Warren Bell refuses to watch the show and points out that it’s doubtful anyone actually cares this much. (In this house, we DVRed it.)
Noted TV critic K-Lo says it has some of the worst dialogue on TV, and cites this line as proof:
Worrying that she’s press the button once a month?
Yes, if she say that actual, maybe then. In reality, that’s been a common half-joking but actually-serious response to the idea of a female president. (And the line was, “[T]hat whole ‘once a month will she or won’t she press the button’ thing.”)
K-Lo complains about the abbreviation for the show. This from a woman who still models her nickname after a fading and largely hated actress/singer/future auto loan pitchwoman.
Tim Graham finds secret liberalism in the show’s choice for the dead Republican president - he narrated episodes of PBS’ Frontline.
John Podhoretz gets saucy because the creator of the show has written other movies about Presidents, including The Contender - people would get unduly critical of a female president’s sexuality? Not in a million years! - and a movie where there was a Jewish president. You see, the creator of the show’s a Jew, and short, so this show must be stupid.
Jonah pipes in with commentary on the show’s fake blog. (A laughably inane group blog? What an insult to the Corner!)
K-Lo (AGAIN) criticizes Geena’s choice of baseball teams.
Guess who comments on First Gentleman issues?
John Podhoretz is back, pretending he doesn’t know what happened on the first episode, despite the fact that K-Lo appears to reside in Geena Davis’ linen closet at this point.
Warren Bell says that Geena Davis’ visit to the MNF booth is the “most awkward moment in recent history”, which seems to ignore that entire “Bush handling Katrina” thing rather handily.
Podhoretz, at some point, makes an incomprehensible Davis joke about Day of the Dolphins.
A reader even manages to chime in, finding the whole premise insulting because they made a show about a woman becoming president and treated it as if it was a show about a woman actually becoming president.
As an endcap, this Louis Wittig piece purports that all liberals secretly want to be like George W. Bush, because our entire cabal put all of our energies into Geena Fucking Davis.
In case you lost count, that’s 14 separate items on a show that every single person on the site thinks is awful and is going to fail - and that’s not including previous CiC coverage on the site, which I’ll spare you the horror of. Suffice to say that it reads a lot like the above, except that much more patently clueless. It’s gotta show you just how spare the liberal bias must be on television that the combined minds behind modern-day Alqonquin Blogtable the Corner focus on this to such a disturbingly thorough degree.
27 Responses to “Jus’ A Wee L’il Bit O’ Obsession”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
I liked the above line of reasoning (if Commander-in-Chief fails, then conservatism wins again!) better when it was a homeless guy in Republic Park muttering something about how if that dog over there takes a shit, then the Rapture will be coming within the next three days.
Or, if you want to be more tasteful, Audrey Tautou’s character in A Very Long Engagement connecting mundane, self-made bets to the continued existence of her boyfriend.
Not to toot my own horn, but a bit ago I wrote about how “K-Lo” was complaining that the show was a campaign contribution from Hollywood to Hillary Clinton. I kid you not. Worst/best left-wing conspiracy ever.
They’re all such stupid, stupid assholes.
people would get unduly critical of a female president’s sexuality? Not in a million years!
How about in three, when the dread Hillary makes the entire conservative movement go completely round the bend simultaneously.
You need to check the links. A bunch of them go to the same article.
Eric - it’s National Review’s dumbass site - they kept giving me the same URL for different posts, since it works for about one hour a day.
In addition to the ‘once a month’ joke about nukular armageddon, we should also point out the related joke/myth/truth: When women are having their monthly ‘insanity’, they just make decisions like men.
Seeing how we’ve managed (thus far, knock wood) to avoid Nuclear Holocaust at the hands of an almost exclusively male-dominated world party game, maybe we’re allowed to have a female president. The obvious benefit would be that she’d likely be able to shame/cow/browbeat any male leader into submission (and probably have him take out the garbage, too).
Do any of the people bitching (pun intended) about how women are irrational and impossible one week in four have any experience interacting with women? I’ve lived with two, plus blood relatives, and I’ve never noticed them becoming irrational regularly.
Of course, I don’t consider a woman having an opinion to be irrational and impossible. Even if the opinion is different from mine.
I thought the show was mildly amusing, though definitely a bit heavy on the lipstick for my taste. The bits with the “First Lady” staff and the little tweaks at Hillary were funny, and the whole independent President theme, wildly improbably as it is, could make a nice set-up for political storylines. Probably it will suck in the end, but I’ll give it a few weeks before deciding.
As for NRO, I can’t believe you manage to read their stuff.
Hershele: from my limited experience, I’d have to say .. it depends. Mostly not, but a couple of women, yes indeedy. Of course, whether that’s biology, or simply being psyched into it by a lifetimes’ propaganda, I couldn’t say: but, the 2 women I’m thinking of are the 2 most conservative/conventional women I’ve known.
the 2 women I’m thinking of are the 2 most conservative/conventional women I’ve known.
… except the 13 weeks a year they have the opportunity to say and do whatever they want and blame it on the hormones, right?
Sadly, I was most fixated on Geena Davis’s overcollagened lips during most of the show (why do people do that to themselves, it looks awful). It’s odd that people focused on the dialogue (which I hope improves) in which Davis makes the period reference - the more interesting piece dialogue was Sutherland’s menopause dig response.
Don’t mention Babylon 5. It’s not the same. And reeks of that which is banned here.
Yea, B5 certainly reeks of quality, humanity and decency.
I did not, however, know those things were specifically banned on The Note. I thought they sucked naturally, not by fiat.
Hershele: “.. except the 13 weeks a year they have the opportunity to say and do whatever they want and blame it on the hormones, right?” Well,sorta, that IS when one of them feels free to fly off to wingnutteria :/
God help me, but I’m with the idiots insofar as I thought the show sucked. Although I did prejudge a little based on the whole “fuck you, dead president, I will rule with an iron fist and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, bwahahaha!” concept. At least they made it less assholish by making the speaker of the house secretly Satan in disguise, and made it so people vote based on the VP in TV-universe, but it’s still creepy. Like basing a West Wing spinoff around John Goodman rushing through all kinds of conservative stuff while Zoe’s kidnapped.
Not as bad as that Kevin Kline movie where the president-impersonator from the Tonight Show siezes power in a benevolent coup by blackmailing the chief-of-staff, at least.
In the overnight ratings Commander in Chief earned more than 16 million viewers, which was nearly twice what its lead-in, According to Jim (which Warren Bell writes for) earned.
Ya know, if conservatives really want to stop the show dead in its tracks, they should talk up how surprisingly good the WB’s Supernatural is.
Somehow, though, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
Thanks for the link, but if you go back and actually read the post of mine about female presidents that you linked to, you’ll see that I never mentioned anything about PMS or pushing the button once a month.
Sadly, I was most fixated on Geena Davis’s overcollagened lips during most of the show (why do people do that to themselves, it looks awful).
Heh. That’s what caught my attention too. Those lips and that stupid red overcoat and Marilyn Quayle hairdo. I realize this is supposed to be a Republican show…but jaysus.
I found the show mildly entertaining. But like Jesse…next week’s previews of every little thing going to hell in a handbasket gave me pause.
It ain’t no West Wing.
Michael - it’s the comments.
Women cycle every month, but men cycle every day! We should all be worried about the President waking up every morning feeling so aggressive and testosterone-y that he declares another war if we’re worried about hormonal cycles.
Of course, I don’t consider a woman having an opinion to be irrational and impossible. Even if the opinion is different from mine.
Freak.
“modern-day Alqonquin Blogtable”
Thees phrase, she breengs up the balls of hair.
*ackkk!* hrnrnrnrnrnrnn! Pthooie!
Dorothy Parker, she ees rrrroll-eeng over een her grave.
so.
Okay, you know what’s *really* funny? Not only have those godless commie-socialist-liberal Western European countries elected female leaders, but a number of Asian nations, including some mostly-Islamic countries have beat us to it. India, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan (2x), Bangdalesh, off the top of my head. Given that we have a serious problem with women being murdered in this country for what are, essentially, mostly unacknowledged honor killings - we really don’t have as much to be smug about in the US as we keep telling ourselves when it comes to gender equity.
Add the Philippines (2x) and Sri Lanka (2x) to Asian countries with elected female leaders, and arguably Myanmar (Burma), although the election winner never took office, but was placed under house arrest instead …
It should be noted, however, that in all of these countries (except possibly Turkey?) every woman elected has been either the daughter or the widow of a male president/prime minister, whose charisma in some sense she shares. FWIW.
*************
Meanwhile, count me among those readers frustrated by the NR links, so that I couldn’t find most of the original comments referred to. I did, however, find the Wittig article (separately linked), and fear it made a disturbing amount of sense. The show is enjoyable, but definitely hokey, and with a disregard for the complexity and subtlety of actual rule that is simplistic. If Wittig wishes to suggest that GWB’s regime takes an equally simplistic view of rule - well, who am I to disagree?
dr ngo, that was how it worked when women started being given public office in the US a hundred years ago at the state level, too. What it seems to mean (just another reinforcement of male authority) and what it means are I think two different things. What actually happened in the cases I’ve read about, was that the people of the towns or counties or states had gotten to *know* these women while their husbands or fathers were in office, and had seen them handling day-to-day stuff, knew directly that they were good, responsible people which trumped all abstract generalizations about Women vs Men and who was as a gender More Responsible etc. It comes down to a matter of trust - trust the individual you’ve seen doing a good job, or trust the Rules that say that males are interchangeable and uniformly honest, smart, etc? with a dynamic tension going the other way, too - we will take a risk on this individual woman, because we generalize that we can trust her because her family has always done a good job, and it must have rubbed off (we hope…) The political is always personal.
But what it is, regardless of personal connections, is a Vote of Confidence in a woman, when by stereotypes there should be no such thing - if they really were as sexist as that, everyone should be going “Eeep! There’s no oldest son, just a daughter! Grab some qualified male in the government and give him the job of running the country, quick, before disaster hits!”
As a history junkie, I find it rather wonderful to watch the same patterns of revolution and reaction being repeated in the same circumstances - and how they can get short-circuited by technological advances and the example of others.
Thus, there were a number of things at that meeting that should *terrify* Cheneyburton & Co - the fact that an alliance of ethnic Turkish and ethnic Kurdish women are unanimously telling us off for being human rights violators; the fact that these women come from a country that elected a female PM long before we are even ready to think about it, as well as taking separation of church and state much more seriously than we do; the fact that they’re paying close attention to goings on here - probably closer attention than even the current State Department is to doings in Turkey - so that they’re following Cindy Sheehan’s deeds as closely as some of us are.
I myself am casually familiar with some of the protest movements and protestors internal to Turkey, because I read the BBC regularly for the last 6 years or so. But I should not be more aware of the socio-political realities of Turkey than one of our diplomats assigned to the region! This, in turn, with Hughes - ought to be terrifying to every American citizen. It’s the kind of obliviousness that hallmarked the post-McCarthy purge State Dept., ideologically-correct sorts who didn’t know and didn’t care about the rest of the world - which got us, btw, into Vietnam…
It should be noted, however, that in all of these countries (except possibly Turkey?) every woman elected has been either the daughter or the widow of a male president/prime minister, whose charisma in some sense she shares. FWIW.
And how does this differ from how GWB got into office?
“It should be noted, however, that in all of these countries (except possibly Turkey?) every woman elected has been either the daughter or the widow of a male president/prime minister, whose charisma in some sense she shares. FWIW.”
And how does this differ from how GWB got into office?
It doesn’t, nor was it for John Quincy Adams nor for Pitt the Younger in England. Which is partly why I appended “FWIW.”
But I do find it somewhat interesting that in the countries eastward of Pakistan (about which I know more than the countries to the west) [1] they seem to have little difficulty accepting female leadership, but [2] they have not yet, any of them, come up with a single female leader not intimately connected with a previous male leader. I accept the point that the latter development may be due in part simply to the greater familiarity that the voting public has with “first ladies” and “first daughters,” but that in turn begs the question of why only these women have that kind of recognition and respect. (One “almost” exception is Miriam Defensor Santiago in the Philippines, who made a respectable run for the presidency in 1992, despite riding no male relative’s coattails.)
This is not intended to imply that these countries are in some sense backward, or to refute the original poster’s suggestion that they are more progressive on this point than the US so far (at least until Hillary is elected! ;} ). It’s just a correlation so strong - about 10 out of 10 by my offhand calculation - as to be worthy of note.
I suspect that in the longer historical run this will be reduced to a footnote, a brief transition between all-male leadership and a leadership elected freely from men and women alike. But, as Adam said to Eve on leaving the Garden of Eden, “We live in an age of transition.”