Oh boo hoo. First that treacherous liberal McCain looks like becoming the next Republican presidential candidate and now they're having their torture porn taken away....

It's All Over: Liberals Officially Take Over "24"

Where will the Dick Cheney fanclub get their electrodes on the nipples action now?

I miss 24. I stopped watching this session not because of the torture issue but because the hyperkinetic stupidity and willfully limited set of conventions that had made it so compelling had finally worn thin and it just wasn't working for me on any level anymore. You can only have people shouting "I need level three clearance to reconfigure the satellite schematics NOW!"  or getting Presidential-Pardons-While-U-Wait so many times (aprox. 3,563) before it stops being funny. But I still miss all that weirdly addictive technobabble -- where the term "protocol" could stand for anything and any encryption could be broken if  you typed fast enough -- and the way no one seemed to remember what had happened an hour earlier, even if it had involved mass murder, family members and James Cromwell.

I don't know if anyone is still watching the show. I read the episode updates just to see how lame it has become, especially since the big nuclear plot sort of fizzled out halfway through and it's now mostly Jack seeing how many innocent people he can get killed and how many circuit boards he can hand over to the Chinese before the day is through, but its not the same. Time for something stupid and new.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh, more torture from Joel "24" Surnow. This is a new snippet from the forthcoming "Fair and Balanced" Fox News "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" featuring the comedy styling of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Where's Jack Bauer when you need him?


Previous sidesplitting "Ho ho, ho, Barack Obama's initials are B.O., ho ho ho!" snippet here.

Okay, so I've gone cold turkey on 24. I gather I missed Morris being tortured with an electric drill or something. I can now watch more progressive, liberal, socially enlightened TV shown at the same time like Two and a Half Men or Zorro - La Espada y la Rosa on Telemundo instead.

Talking of Spanish language TV, it's been a while since I pointed out how the more inappropriate the program, the hotter and more slutty the presenter(s). I caught some Saturday morning kids' show called Múevete last week on Univision which seemed to concentrate mainly on the female presenter's boobs, which were hoicked up around her ears, zooming in on the similar attributes of various other scantily -clad women (seen here playing Jenga!) and games designed simply to get girls in bikinis to fall into troughs of chocolate sauce. (Or maybe it was mole sauce.) You don't get that on PBS Kids.

Haven't figured out what my position is yet on the 24 Promotes Torture And Other Right Wing Nastiness So Stop Watching It campaign. Reading the New Yorker piece on Joel Surnow is a bit of any eye opener, however. I knew he was proudly conservative but didn't realize he was a self-confessed "right wing nut job" who hangs out with the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh....

I've always believed that the politics of an artist or anyone involved in the creative process shouldn't unduly influence your view of the finished product. That way lies the foolishness of Michael Medved and gang who usually start blubbering that if the assistant caterer on a movie read The Nation thirty years ago the whole thing is polluted and typical Hollywood Secular Gay propaganda and I feel uneasy when people on the left doing the same sort of thing.

But is it the same? It's not just that 24 has a raving dittohead at the controls. The guy's rancid politics permeate the show and make what might otherwise be edgy, over-the-top, ultra-violent escapism into fodder for those who believe torture is acceptable as long as it's done by us and with a straight face -- and that America needs remorseless, dehumanized killing machines like Jack Bauer to do the dirty work. Until reading that article I could happily accept it was just hyperactive mindless entertainment that kissed realism goodbye 30 seconds into the first episode and never looked back, and if anyone thought it was some sort of feel good show that somehow validated their militant xenophobia  it was their problem.  But now...?

Tick tick,  just 06:37:54 to make my mind up before tonight's double episode....

I suspect all those rightwingers who were claiming 24 as their own are probably starting to draft their "Why I Didn't Really Expect Anything Better Than Anti-American Propaganda From The Liberal Secular Entertainment Industry" pieces even now.

1. Clobbered by another migraine on the way into work (some point between the front doors and the elevator) so I spend the first hour at my desk with my eyes closed, cautiously sipping water. And no one noticed anything different.

2. Tivo'd 24 and watched Heroes last night. Accidentally read the major plot twist for this episode of 24 online this morning, however. That it is pretty much the same twist as in the latest episode of Ugly Betty (albeit without the skiing accident and sex change) shows I watch too much TV. It does explain why the world's most devious, manipulative mastermind was always referred to by his wussy first name last session, however.

3. Asludickid will tell ya, Hugh Hewitt is a twit. As is Dean Barrett, currently trying on Hughie's clownpants at Town Hall. According to Barrett, the Dems are evil manipulative soldier-haters because Nancy Pelosi made a reference to marines recently as "young people" which according to this pudding is a "truly offensive" and "borderline grotesque" thing to do -- and probably emboldens America's enemies who had previously assumed they were ageless, indestructable fighting machines rather than kids in their early 20s.

4.Yes, I believe drunks do think the TV is talking directly to them.

What, you didn't have a local promotion for the new series of 24?