There be some folks at NPR that love them their Jack Bauer. Why just last month, little Stevie Inskeep was getting his Jack on just thinking about wanting to hit an uncooperative prisoner. It's not just the guys at NPR either; Pam Fessler was pretty jazzed for Jack just last spring.
Now that there's a mood in the ruling class to sweep a few little unpleasantries under the rug and move on with the surging victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, you wouldn't expect NPR to miss the chance to get a little Foxy Jack back on the show.
So this morning Ari Shapiro enjoys a deep intellectual Fox commercial for 24.
We hear the Jack character at a Congressional hearing say, "Am I above the law? No sir, I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide what price I should pay. But please do not sit there with that smug look on your face."
Shapiro comments that "this sounds like a real hearing that took place a few months ago with some Bush administration officials called to testify about torture." Ari must be thinking about NPR News' fantasy coverage (try to find it if you can) of the House and Senate hearings that actually did occur.
You have to love how even though Abu Ghraib and other US torture atrocities became public in 2004, Keifer Sutherland says "with regards to the torture aspect....Then obviously the events in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and everything else became a real focal point for us as a nation to look at what we were doing. So it only seemed sensible that we as a show would do the same thing." Kind of fits the pattern of all these criminals of the past 8 years experiencing conversions on the death bed of the Bush presidency...ugh.
But Ari mainly wants to plug the excitement of the show. He asks Sutherland, "Does your pulse jump when you hear that little ticking second sound?....Mine does!"
