I was a fan of the TV show "The West Wing", and have watched it pretty much from it's inception, for all mind-numbing seven years. I think I watched because it was nice to see a place where democrats actually tried to govern and spoke of real issues and had real debates and understood facts and stuff -- even though it was a fake universe, it was a better one than the alternative reality many democrats seem to live in.
(OK, ASIDE HERE: I use the term "democrats" a lot. It's just shorthand. I don't believe most democrats, or even a majority of democrats, would fall into any of the groups which I label "democrat" in my posts. It's just an easy way of refering to them, which doesn't make it right, but makes it easy for me).
The last show, as usual, had many little factoids which would make the show useful educationally if it were not for the inordinate number of times they get these "factoids" wrong.
This show's false factoid regarded the inauguration. After a running theme of a particularly cold day for the TV inaugural of the president-elect Santos, Jeb and Abby are conversing about the weather, and Abby asks Jeb who's bright idea it was to have an outside inauguration in January. Jeb answers with the names of several of our Founding Fathers, I think "Franklin, Jefferson, Madison", but I'm a little fuzzy on that.
In any case, they were off by a bit, as the original Inauguration Date was set in the Constitution as March 4th. It wasn't until the last century that the date was moved to January 20th, by the 20th amendment. The change took effect in 1937.
Anyway, I probably won't miss the West Wing much, it was getting old and stale.
1 comment:
Charles, it is a shame when the writers got some of the basic facts wrong but overall I will still miss the show. I think this final season was pretty strong and the campaign gave a nice view of what things could be like if people were willing to run on the issues and not via attack ads. Overall West Wing was one of the few shows left on broadcast TV that dealt with real world issues and I think primetime will be a little poorer for its abscence.
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