(SCENE: a nondescript hotel room, covered with paper, the television tuned to CNN. JOSH, TOBY, SAM, DONNA, and CJ are sitting around the room in various states of concentration.)
SAM: (reading aloud) “This election is important, not because it is about change but because it is about choice. As a politician, I choose to present you with facts. My opponent chooses to lie to you. Your job is to choose as well – but the other guy doesn’t want your job to be easy.”
TOBY: Shift from formal speech to informal conversation. Wait, did I say informal? I meant “folksy.”
SAM: Folksy?
TOBY: From my lips to L’il Abner’s ears, yes.
SAM: What’s wrong with folksy? People like folksy.
TOBY: How about he’s not folksy? How about it comes across as inauthentic? Like he’s trying to get people to like him?
CJ: But we are trying to get people to like him.
TOBY: There’s a fine line between charismatic and pathetic. You are jumping, you are vaulting over that line.
SAM: I’ll rewrite it.
Silence. Then:
JOSH: When did people stop doing math?
DONNA: For me, that would be grade eleven.
JOSH: I don’t mean – look. He’s promising to increase military spending and cut taxes, and his entire plan for not making the country go broke is cutting earmarks. That’s like you trying to pay off your credit card by saving your change when you buy gum.
DONNA: I don’t have that much on my credit card.
JOSH: Yes you do.
(Pause.)
DONNA: There was a sale on widescreen televisions.
JOSH: You watch the news and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
DONNA: And I can see every last one of their pores in glorious high definition.
JOSH: But you watch the news. Donna, how is the fiscal outlook of the United States right now?
DONNA: Are you asking me or are you asking the campaign’s press secretary?
JOSH: I’m asking you.
DONNA: Then it’s pretty bad.
JOSH: Then why does he think he can just yell out “tax cuts” and everything will work?
CJ: Because both parties spent years convincing the American electorate that we were on the wrong side of the Laffer curve and we needed to cut taxes in order to make the government more efficient and put more money in voters’ pockets.
JOSH: I know, but wouldn’t you think they’d have figured out we were all full of crap yet?
CJ: You’d think.
Silence for a while, then:
TOBY: I can’t take this any more!
JOSH: (checking watch) Who had eight-thirty to nine o’clock in the pool?
SAM and DONNA and CJ: (in unison) Charlie.
JOSH: Why do I ever let that kid gamble?
TOBY: How do I do this job? He just lies and lies and lies and nobody gives a damn!
JOSH: We do.
TOBY: You don’t count.
SAM: Black voters do. Hispanics do. Younger –
TOBY: Yes, Sam, thank you, I needed a description of the Democratic Party’s traditional base, now how about independent voters? You know, the stupid ones? I mean, I knew they were stupid, we spend most of every other year catering to their stupidity, but I thought until now they were just dense and uninterested, not actively handicapped!
JOSH: Look, we knew we’d have to grind this one out.
TOBY: This isn’t “grinding it out,” Josh. Every day they lie. Phyllis Schafly’s hot daughter is on the campaign trail every day lying – not shading the truth, not trying to make a bad thing look better, she’s just lying every time she opens her goddamn mouth about things that are in the public record for anybody to see!
CJ: Toby, the press –
TOBY: The press! The press! The press is useless, CJ! Worse than useless! Never mind that this year the choice comes down to a gifted young leader and the Cryptkeeper and they want “balance” – you know what they call them? “Distortions.” Not lies. “Distortions.”
DONNA: “Distortions” doesn’t sound that good.
TOBY: It sounds better than “lies” and that’s all that matters. People who don’t follow politics know what “distortions” are – they’re what you get when a politician tries to make something average sound good. But this – I don’t know to fight this. We call them lies, everybody will get caught up in a big round of “everybody does it” and nobody cares. Worse, we destroy what we’ve got – a guy who people think doesn’t like it because he doesn’t like it. We’re walking a razor here and I’m out of ideas.
(Pause.)
JOSH: I vote for beer.
TOBY: Is that your answer to this?
JOSH: It’s my answer to needing beer. Come on, Toby, let’s go get a drink and then come back and tackle it fresh.
(All rise and proceed to exit. From out in the hallway…)
SAM: You know, he jumps from formal speech to folksy all the time when he writes his own stuff.
TOBY: Great. Let’s get him a straw hat and have him hum the tune to “Hee Haw.” I bet that puts Alabama in play.
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“Let’s get him a straw hat and have him hum the tune to “Hee Haw.” I bet that puts Alabama in play.”
That’s crazy enough to work.
Say this about being frustrated or pissed off: it cures boredom.
The thing about calling a spade a spade (and if only John McCain would say something like that in reference to some Obama proposal so it could set off a whole “John McCain used a racial slur” frenzy akin to the “Barack Obama called Palin a pig” frenzy…oh no wait, the Obama campaign is probably too classy to make that claim, and I don’t know whether that’s good or bad right now) bugs me too. In this case, call a lie a lie.
Aside from “distortion” there’s another word I’m sick of: “misleading.” They are not “misleading” most of the time, they are lying. Goddammit, everybody in the media should be like Joy Behar and say, when they refer to lies, “these are lies.” How many people would vote for a guy who lied all the time, and who was called a liar all the time? Wasn’t Joe Biden’s first shot at the presidency sunk precisely because people saw him as a liar, as somebody who wasn’t honest about where his speech came from?
@Rob
The only problem with that, is then you get everybody and their damn mothers flinging around accusations about who lied about what. It wouldn’t matter if it’s true since, as the dialogue pointed out, most of the masses are slightly less than averagely retarded.
There are actually interesting, cognitive-psychology reasons why the facts don’t matter in politics. For a good summary, check out this blog post:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/84811,cognitive-radios-to-improve-public-safety-and-wireless-devices.aspx
That said, nicely written bit. Crushingly depressing (and I’m saying this as an American law student with a profound belief in the power of politics), but well-written nonetheless.
Argh, I mispasted that link: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/09/why_the_facts_dont_matter_in_p.php
Brian P.: Enough though I’ve seen examples of this in my life, isn’t still scary to have it affirmed.
The only problem with that, is then you get everybody and their damn mothers flinging around accusations about who lied about what.
If only there were some, oh, I dunno, almost like a Fourth branch of government which could investigate and report on things and could be counted on to inform the public as to which things really were lies and which were not.
Sometimes I really wish we had one of those.
@ Sean
I wish we had one of those that was completely unbiased and reported ALL lies… Instead, we here in the states have stations like Fox News, who say that the bleeding-heart liberals/democratics are always lying, or on the other hand, you have the liberal bloggers and intar-web news sources that all say the war-mongering, racist conservatives/republicans are lying.
So, basically, we’re screwed.
Lessons learned in life thus far: 1. Most (American) people are retards, 2. Avoid most (American) people and anything that reminds you of them.
THANK YOU FOR BREAKING RULE #2 MGK
I ALREADY HAVE TO
*”I already have to live here.” (I also need a new keyboard)
I left Texas soon after Bush was re-elected. He was a miserable governor and much worse as president.
I often wonder if people get turned off by the election because all they seem to hear is lies and accusations about lying. In turn, it assists in reducing voter turnout. (I know this is not the only reason why voter turnout is low.) The modern day purpose of an election seems to be allowing politicians to act like bratty children, who pull pig tails and call their opponents “dumb, dumb heads”. The media and many aspects of the blogosphere aren’t helping the situation.
I was sick of the US election when the Canadian election was called. For those paying attention to both election processes we are getting beaten over the head with muck and accusations. If only Aaron Sorkin could write this electoral process. The cast of characters would be better looking, the story line better developed, and the banter would be entertaining.
Nice script MGK.
In the off-chance that you haven’t read David Brooks’s column (and really, why would you?), I recommend it. But that’s only because Gene Robinson pointed the way for me.
And, again, undecided voters are morons.
Old.
I’m also a Texan, and while I wasn’t really old enough that I was at all politically engaged during Bush’s time as governor, I have to say I don’t think he was all bad. It’s PRIMARILY his foreign policy and national security shit that’s been fucking us all over, and as a state governor he obviously couldn’t go there. He also spoke out against Official English, which isn’t something you get to hear that often from a Republican.
And, again, undecided voters are morons.
Old.
I didn’t read it like that. What makes these voters so stupid is the reasons they have for voting the way they do.
McCain is tells them “Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergarteners”, and they actually believe it. That’s stupidity.
McCain picks a woman as his running mate, and a surprising number of women decide to vote for him based purely on that, without considering first what kind of person Palin is and what she believes. That’s stupidity. (I mean Jesus, look at this.)
McCain says something like “my opponent wants to raise your taxes” and a ridiculous number of voters say “OH NOES! Obama wants to raise my taxes!” They just take him at his word without bothering to actually look and see what Obama has said he would do. That’s stupidity.
I’m sorry, but these are stupid reasons to vote for McCain and they’re stupid reasons to have reservations about Obama. People are supposed to be too smart to fall for this kind of stuff.
Are there no smart reasons to have reservations about Obama?
Sure there are. But an alarming number of voters aren’t deciding after thinking things through intelligently. They’re deciding because of Palin’s sex or because they believe bullshit claims made by the McCain camp. Those people? Very stupid.
Those people may be stupid, but not all undecided voters are those people.
I miss The West Wing. 🙁
[…] for 17/09/08 Chris Bird is bored in a West Wing sort of […]
Are there no smart reasons to have reservations about Obama?
Of course. The problem is that they’re all even bigger reasons to have reservations about McCain.
You know, for a second there I thought this was actually from the show. Got a good ear there, MightyGodKing (or shall I call you Steve?)
You wanna know why the Republicans are lying their asses off? Because they’ve spent the last 30 years building up their rock-hard unbreakable utterly-correct ideology (deregulate, and the free market will grow! stay strong with a massive military, and the world will cater to our whims! cut taxes, because taxes pay for a bloated liberal socialized government!) only to find out their ideology doesn’t fit into the Real World (Welcome to the GOPatrix! The hero’s name is… NeoCon). Rather than deal with reality, they’d rather lie to keep their useless ideology afloat, even as the whole charade collapses around them.
Sorkin himself got into the act today.
–d