Friday Morning Fix - November 21st, 2008

One of the things I’ve always liked about Obama is that he projects a “cool” image without making it look like he’s trying too hard. Contrast that with the wooden, grumpy John McCain that we saw during the election and it’s easy to see why he has such celebrity power. He’s easy to look up to. So why the hell is he playing the ultimate Hollywood groupie by trying to live a real-life episode of the West Wing?

I thought the West Wing was an incredibly well-written and spectacularly acted show. It was absolutely 100% left-leaning - conservative characters were just plain unlikable, as if the writers couldn’t think of a good thing to say about anyone on the right – but it was such a good show I didn’t care. In the finale, the new President elect (played by Jimmy Smits) reaches out to his former opponent (played by the elder statesman of fine actors - Alan Alda) and offers him the Secretary of State post. It was a cool ending, but naming Hillary Clinton as your Secretary of State (which appears imminent) is not a wise move (I wrote about why right here). Regardless, Obama’s connection to the West Wing is much more direct:

West Wing fans stunned by the similarity between the fictitious Matthew Santos and the real-life Barack Obama now know that the resemblance is no coincidence. When the West Wing scriptwriters first devised their fictitious presidential candidate in the late summer of 2004, they modelled him in part on a young Illinois politician - not yet even a US senator - by the name of Barack Obama.

Obama’s pick of Clinton has also breathed some life into Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. She spoke to Politico:

“Number one, what you’ve got is a president-elect who reads history and values it, and that’s just a great thing. … He called me after he read the book, way back at the beginning of the primary. My cell phone rang, I picked it up and he just said, ‘Hello, this is Barack Obama.’ He talked to me even then about the book, and then throughout the campaign he kept talking about it, how he would want to put people around him who would argue with him, have a range of opinions. His first step seems to be totally in step with that concept, both in terms of possibly appointing Hillary to be secretary of state, talking with John McCain.”

I still say it’s a bad move. I hope I’m wrong.

Evidently, some Somalis have seen too many Johnny Depp movies. Piracy is alive in well off the horn of Africa:

The surge in hijackings came as Saudi Arabia confirmed that a ransom demand had been made for the freeing of the Sirius Star supertanker, seized at the weekend with her crew of 25 and a cargo of oil worth $100 million (£65 million).

That’s some major booty.

Bold prediction: these guys will get cocky and either disrupt the transport of oil in the region or hijack a well-connected American or European ship and all hell will be unleashed on them. Then we won’t hear about pirates for a long time.

Governor Sarah Palin continues to massacre her own image. Watch this video and try to remember that the producer asked her if the background shot was OK. “No worries,” she replied. Also, while you’re watching the turkeys get slaughtered behind her, try to listen to her incoherent, cliché-ridden rambling. It’s as if her answers were written to coincide with the slaughter. Amazing.