Well, Now It's Bridges and Tunnels | The West Wing
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ต.ค. 2024
- “Finding qualified sacrificial lambs ain't easy.”
Season 4 Episode 4: The Red Mass
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"Bridges and tunnels. That's my nightmare. What's yours?"
"Well, now it's bridges and tunnels, Sam."
"Then my work here is done."
Kudos to Sorkin, Spencer, and Lowe.
In this scene you can see Sam realize we brought the plane down
Literally a second later before the video cuts off, Sam asks Leo if they had anything to do with it. Leo doesn’t answer and Sam just realizes it silently.
They're faxing it over. A phrase that has gone the way of the buggy whip.
Buggy whips are still in demand. We just repurposed them.
Sadly, there are times in modern politics that the BEST we can do is just preventing the whole works from falling down. Sadly, also, our current crop of pols is so busy playing circular firing squad. Most people DO NOT/CANNOT FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO.
I’ve come to think of it like the playoffs. The goal is to just keep on playing for as long as we can
unfortunately, too many career politicians decide kowtowing to their power base in order to keep their seat is the right thing to do. one party still believes government is the answer, the other thinks the opposite. who has the easier job of keeping their base happy? the one that promises to do the least amount of interfering in their voters' lives, that's who.
@@alertgasper I may not totally agree with you. THE 'less government' CULT has discovered that rather than ACTUALLY VOTING AGAINST SOMETHING, WHERE IT MIGHT GET NOTICED. TO JUST NOT SHOW UP TO VOTE!
@@alertgasper They’re responding to underlying trends in the general public. Sure, they aggravate it (one side more than the other), but they would be punished for doing so the trends were going the opposite direction.
@@ER1CwC In some ways, politicians respond to trends, but we also see them be out of touch (classically, GHW Bush going to a supermarket and marveling at UPC scanners that had already been around for years). We discover their laws can regularly go against public opinion (abortion, gun laws etc), but they are catering to fringe groups who are dedicated voters. sometimes a political can rail against something like CRT that isn't even in their state's classrooms yet.
and of course there's the lobbyists writing laws that the representatives don't even bother to read. one of the largest groups is AARP for retired folks, so there's probably more "representation" going on there as our population ages out.
then there's stuff like going to war. There wasn't a trend to find WMD in Iraq, but boy the politicians sure got out ahead of it and drummed one up. Schools may have to resort to bake sales, but the war machine doesn't have to worry about cash.
I really loved Sam Seaborn as a supporting character on TWW
His contributions to scenes were substantive and thought provoking, and it appeared his character had some depth to it. He just wasn’t meant to lead THIS show, so he had to make other creative choices
Pretty good minds and a pretty good bridge.
"You're one of the best minds of your generation" kinda sums up why they might not have found a reason...too many people who think alike in a system that squeezes out creative approaches. All still true.
in the past, the answer would have been, "get off oil, go with renewables". yet america now exports oil, and still gives a darn what happens to who in the middle east and not what else happens to who else, in the middle east.
That is a pre-US dependence on middle eastern oil problem. Goes back to the end of WWII. We made aid dependent on Europe giving up it's empires. We didn't say how it had to be done, so Europe did the most Europe thing possible. They bordered things at mountains or rivers and drew straight lines everywhere else. That caused a lot of troubles in the middle east and it wouldn't have been an insurmountable problem if we hadn't done one more thing. We created Israel from whole cloth on top of the city 80% of the entire world's population claims is their holy city. Moved millions of them there to give them their own country after the Holocaust. And then backed it up by force. We did it with the best of intentions, but now we're stuck with it. If we don't keep backing Israel there will be a genocide from every country around them invading. It isn't right. It isn't good. Israel keeps stabbing us in the back and doing unspeakable things. But none of us want to see every single country bordering them invade the country. That's why we keep backing them on Palestine. Every country around Israel has a string of military bases at the border and a strike plan just in case we ever get tired of them. We allow thousands of deaths to stave off millions. No one is happy with it. But it's the same reasoning for things like why we won't sign the land mine treaty, Korea. We recognize them as a war crime. We cannot ban them or say that because of the demilitarized zone. We allow what we know is a war crime to happen because it's better than the alternative. US foreign policy is full of stuff like this. It's compromises on compromises to bad situations. No one likes any of it. We just know we like the alternatives less. It's the price we pay for being the only world super power. Everyone gets to say whatever they like about it all, foreign and domestic. People all over the world say all sorts of things about these policies. And they are all right on some level. But they aren't the ones who'll have to live with the consequences. The stakes aren't real for them.
@@halycon404 some of that country division also happened at the end of WW1, such as the Ottoman Empire. we stripped landlocked Germany and the island of Japan of its few colonies after 1945, and the best chance our European allies had to repay their debts to us was to lean on their colonies--which the US rarely stepped in to stop (like the Suez Canal that led to war in the ME), regardless of the promise of the League of Nations (and later the UN). Colonization arguably created fertile ground for Communism--Ho Chi Minh studied how America kicked England out for ideas on how to handle the French--that led to proxy battlegrounds of the Cold War. Of course, that judgement comes in hindsight--at the time, we felt the end of the world was nigh. Funny that people think globalization is a new thing, it could possibly be traced back to the East India Company and the British Empire, but that's a debate for another time.
you are 1,000% correct about how Europe carved up new nations--Iraq a glaring example, with Kurds and Shi'a and Sunni, it just about took a dictator like Saddam playing them against each other to keep the nation from splintered like Sudan did this century. And Israel is truly the proverbial tiger we have by the tail. During the Cold War, we learned a lot with our tanks in IDF hands going up against Soviet armor in Arab hands, on a desert similar to the fields of Europe--we learned what did and did not work without going into a conventional WW3. an argument can be made that we're trying to solve the MidEast issue with all the techniques that got us in there--including supporting the Saudis (even though North America gets its oil from Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and Venezuala) to keep oil prices stable and continue to get the world to buy oil in US dollars, which replaces the gold standard Nixon took us off.
As you said, the Israelis have kicked us in the jewels with stuff like the 1967 USS Liberty, but we probably aren't handing them foriegn aid without an agenda, either. there can be an argument made that Israel is safer from invasion by making deals with Egypt, Jordan and now Saudi Arabia than by kicking the pink frosted shit out of both nations time and again. but there's still Iran and Syria to diddle with via proxy wars that accomplish nothing more than killing civilians.
I might argue about we being the only superpower--since 1945, our conventional wars have been stalemates or worse (except I guess Antiqua and Panama) and Iraq was...well, we cleared out a space for ISIS once we figured out our patsy wasn't going to show up for work as next strongman. Russia still makes Europe uncomfortable, and the Chinese have won hearts and minds in Africa (where we just sell guns to anti Al Shabab governments) and South America with the kind of investments we did in the 1960's. No doubt, though, we're still the global cop who answers the 911 call, and are just as well loved as the local police for it.
@@halycon404World War I, not II. All the problems started with Sykes-Picot and Britain screwing the Hashemites.
@@halycon404 Oh FFS. Please, stop digging already. We get it, you have a problem with Jews.
Jews formed Israel, thank you very much, and it is the only nation in the region with a working liberal democracy. Jews, not Europeans moved to Israel, because they wanted to, and of course, after the Nazi genocide, needed to. Of course, that's only half of Israel's Jewish population. The rest, are Jews who lived in the Middle East for over a millennium. They had to flee for their lives as a result of Arab and Muslim ethnic cleansing.
And unlike its neighbors, Israel doesn't stab the US in the back. Nor does it commit "unspeakable things".
Does every neighboring country want to still invade and slaughter all the Jews? It wouldn't shock me. But take a quick survey of the neighborhood. Lebanon is a failed state that is literally bankrupt. It can't keep the lights on, water running, trash picked up, or its hospitals filled with medicine. Meanwhile, because of corruption or malfeasance, they managed to blow up their only grain silos. Syria? Let's see, on its 2nd generation of bloodthirsty dictators, the latter who has slaughtered about 500,000 of his own, and sent half the country fleeing for their lives, with 5 million of that count overseas. Jordan? 25 years after first reporting on its water shortage (Jordan Times, 2000), the country still is hemorrhaging water and requires over 100 million cubic meters from Israel to make up for the shortfall. And of course, it was back in 1970 when Israel was called on to protect Jordan's border from a pending Syrian invasion. Egypt? It only relied on Israel's military to protect itself from Islamist terrorists in the Sinai. Oh, and a quick rundown. Lebanon doesn't have a military capable of invading, that falls to Iran's proxy army, Hizballah, the same guys who helped Bashar Assad slaughter those half-million Syrians. Syria keeps its troops beyond the DMZ as per the requirements at the end of the 1973 war. Same thing for Egypt but further back. Jordan? It's more concerned with potential internal unrest, ISIS, and an Iranian push through Iraq than Israel.
Oh, and the Palestinians? Please, Arafat walked away from a deal in 2000 at Camp David, that even the Saud's said was a criminal act on his part. Abbas did the same in 2008. Meanwhile, Israel, which left Gaza unilaterally in 2005, has faced five rocket wars initiated by Hamas, with October 7, 2023 being the latest and worst. But even then, Israel is told to fight with both arms and one leg tied behind its back.
Oh yeah, and a quick reminder, not only has Israel offered peace terms to the Palestinians, but to the Lebanese too (Israel unilaterally withdrew from there in 1999 and offered peace terms, again in 2006 after Hizballah's war), and even before that, offered up the Golan Heights to Hafez al-Assad (Bashar's father) who rejected the peace offer. And yet, these two states refuse to even acknowledge Israel's existence.
So spare us about the Jews being the problem rather than the states that are long-running dictatorships that still have yet to get their political, economic, and diplomatic acts together since they became independent states.
"still gives a darn what happens to who in the middle east and not what else happens to who else, in the middle east."
Wait until you find out the 'who' that owns the United States.