Go ABC!

I'm quickly becoming disappointed with Commander in Chief. While there are occasionally some good lines, the show tends to compress complex issues into soundbites, just like TV news and Congress. Throw in some Party-of-Five-style family crises, and the show becomes a rushed jumble, resolved in the last five minutes by some unexplained brilliance on the part of President Allen (Geena Davis). The shows seems to be frantically trying to keep up with the headlines: last week terrorism and torture, this week hurricanes, next week leaks. (I'm guessing the week after that will be a Supreme Court vacancy.) And then there are those annoying previews for the show which follows it, Boston Legal. The previews frequently feature William Shatner in his boxer shorts, something which doesn't exactly draw me in.

Except this week maybe it should have. Read this about a case on last Tuesday's show, where James Spader's character represents a woman suing the government because her brother was killed in Iraq after being overextended by a stop-loss order and doing something he wasn't trained to do. Excerpt:

He was sent into combat with insufficient backup, he was sent in to perform duties for which he was never ever trained! He wasn't given the most basic of equipment. And then after his tour of duty was up they wouldn't let him leave. He never assumed those risks by enlisting. Over extended, under equipped, non-trained. He never signed up for that. And now he's dead. And aside from his sister, nobody seems to care. We talk about honoring the troops. How about we honor them by giving a damn when they're killed? Our kids are dying over there. In this country, the people, the media, we all just chug along like nothing is wrong. We'll spend a month obsessing about Terri Shiavo. But dare we show the body of a fallen soldier? The most watched cable news station will spend an hour a night on a missing girl in Aruba, but God forbid we pay any attention when kids like Private Elliot are killed in action...

Links to the video are here.