The Newsroom

This is my new guilty pleasure.  The term "guilty pleasure" implies that it's stupid but it isn't.  It's brilliant.

It was created and written my Aaron Sorkin who is one of my favorite screen writers.  He is also the brains behind The West Wing, my very favorite all time show in the history of television. I think my next bender will be watching all the seasons again.  This time I will take notes.

I love the way he writes like an articulate intellectual.  His characters always say what I want to say when I'm tongue tied in a political argument.  My best friend says I become very articulate when I'm angry.  And it's true.  When I'm angry and venting about something I turn into a fierce champion for what's right.  When I am confronted with a person I fail to remember all my vocabulary and resort to emotional grunts and moans.

One of my good friends is a Republican.  He is a "Taxed Enough Already" Republican.  He doesn't really care about the Christian right issues but he doesn't want to pay for children he doesn't have to go to school.  He doesn't want to participate in TANF or Snap.  He is fine seeing starving men, women and children suffering from a whole host of diseases on the street.  He chooses not to walk down those streets so it doesn't matter anyway.  He is a social Darwinist. 

He ripped into me and my mother one night with his Fox News dogma.  We very quietly sat through his rant and we did not talk for two months.  His argument was based on financial greed.  He still believes in the trickle down theory of economics and I doubt Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman could convince him to think otherwise.

The Newsroom grabs the Tea Party by the horns and wrestles with it the way the media should.  

In January 2009 John Stewart had a monologue where he told the conservatives who were angry about President Obama's successful bid for the presidency that they had 20 months until the mid term election and they needed to pace their rage.  They did and voted, in my opinion, the most worthless group of legislators I've seen in my lifetime.  A few weeks ago, Terry Gross interviewed Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times on her show Fresh Air, that airs nightly on NPR. It was about how little this congress has done.  ( I have included a link to the show.)

In short they have done almost nothing.  They throw tantrums and try to repeal Obama-care.  They throw more tantrums and deny SNAP benefits to hungry children.  They throw tantrums and revoke funding for education.  They do what they can to shut down the unions.  They do what they can to make abortion illegal yet they also want abstinence-only education in school. And then there are the wars.

I saw a Bill Moyers quote on Facebook that all the money we've spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could fund higher education for all high school graduates for at least the next 50 years.  Maybe that's a bit of a dream that would never come true, but it could feed a lot of hungry kids and supply a lot of after school programs. 

The Newsroom doesn't go into that much detail.  I've spent most of this entry spouting off about my own beliefs.  What it has done has gotten me and a lot of other liberals I know fired up against the Tea Party.  It has reminded us that we are appalled by what they represent.  It has helped us to articulate our arguments against them the next time we have one.

If you are a liberal like I am, get your hands on a copy of it, watch it and take notes.  It'll be worth your time.