Joel Surnow loves Joe McCarthy?

The Washington Post has an interesting push-back on that New Yorker article about torture on 24. The Post’s Peter Carlson just rolls his eyes that ANYONE could ever possibly take their cues from television.

Am I crazy or is attacking torture by lobbying the producers of "24" almost as ridiculous as trying to make nuclear power plants safer by urging the producers of "The Simpsons" to stop letting Homer play with plutonium in the lunchroom of the Springfield nuke plant?

Yes because we know TV is not an influential medium at all. Even though the people who teach at West Point have said, directly, 'people are looking at 24 and thinking it represents a rational line of thought.' Yes it’s “art” but there is a saying “life imitates art” for a reason.

I even pulled out this old quote from Chris Matthews (from the Washington Post) where here’s a life-imitating-art-imitating-life.

"You know what I find sometimes when I am drifting sometimes on this show, and we do five hours a week? I can't really assume a spontaneous attitude about a guest, so I find myself locking into you. I find myself doing Darrell Hammond doing me, because it's sort of comfortable to get into that sort of slipstream of the way you do me. Isn't that weird?"

-- "Hardball" TV commentator Chris Matthews to his "Saturday Night Live" impersonator, Darrell Hammond. "Yes, that's weird," Hammond agreed. Washington Post February 9, 2004

Anyway the most interesting nugget from Carlson’s article is that Sunrow, who is totally cozy with neo-fascist Ann Coulter, is now collaborating with her on what Surnow describes as “a movie that depicted Joe McCarthy as an American hero.”

I thought Ann had abandoned her crazy line of thinking that people were going to start lining up with Joe McCarthy again but clearly she’s been able to entice others into her way of thinking. And it doesn’t surprise me she picked the most fascist artist of the moment.