What Aaron Sorkin Gets Wrong About America



 Perhaps next time Mr. Sorkin looks up from his keyboard, he will pick up a newspaper and note that the U.S., even in times as trying as these, is still a nation that has time for the downtrodden, the dispossessed and the forsaken

Aaron Sorkin is something like the poet laureate of American television (though, in the debased world of American popular culture, that’s less of an honorific than it sounds). Sorkin, who has also scripted such films as A Few Good Men, The American President, The Social Network and Moneyball, is responsible for two of the most celebrated TV series of recent vintage, ABC’s critically acclaimed (but lightly viewed) Sports Night and NBC’s White House-centered megahit The West Wing.

There are two hallmarks to his style: lyrical, fast-paced, whip-smart dialogue and unapologetic, sometimes militant liberalism.

To Sorkin’s credit, his undeniable gifts as a writer have often been sufficient to make even conservative viewers tolerate the reflexive ideology that suffuses his work. Not so, however, in The Newsroom, his new series chronicling an anodyne television news anchor who decides mid-career to rebrand himself as a Keith Olbermann-style journalistic vigilante.

In the show’s pilot, which aired on HBO last weekend, anchor Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels), has his moment of truth during a journalism panel at Northwestern University where, in rejecting the premise of a college student’s question about what makes America the greatest county on earth, he drops the aw shucks persona and responds with an anti-American rant punctuated by this aside to a conservative co-panelist:  Cont. Reading

ObamaCare Takeaway: A Net Win Constitutionally

Years from now, here is the proposition for which law students will study this week’s Supreme Court ObamaCare decision: Federal power is not unlimited under the commerce clause after all.

Granted, the United States Supreme Court engaged in a contortion worthy of Cirque de Soleil in upholding ObamaCare’s individual mandate as a “tax,” despite the fact that Obama himself denied it was a tax and Congress did not offer it as such.

In a September 20, 2009 interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Barack Obama stubbornly and unequivocally denied that ObamaCare’s individual mandate was a “tax”:

George Stephanopoulos: That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.

Barack Obama: No. That’s not true, George. The – for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. Cont. Reading