Patricia McCarthy: Too soon to know

Anyone who read Tom Clancy's novel, Debt of Honor, published in 1994, has most likely wondered why it was not made into a film long ago.  It is a gripping novel, written long before 9/11.  The book tells the story of a Japanese man whose parents were killed at the end of WWII.  He plots his deranged revenge by becoming a pilot and ultimately flying a jetliner into the Capitol building during the State of the Union address.  In that book, his main character Jack Ryan, from his books Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, etc., is the "designated survivor." 

It is this book that is the likely kernel of the idea for the new television series, Designated Survivor, a Kiefer Sutherland venture very similar in vein to his long-running series, 24.   In this program, he is a lowly cabinet member who is catapulted into the presidency when every other person in the government senior to him is killed in a catastrophic event right out of Tom Clancy's novel. 

The swearing-in

After only two episodes, there is something unnerving about the show; where is it going?  It could be good; or it could be a work of anti-American, pro-Muslim propaganda.   It is too soon to know.

It is an absolute myth that after 9/11 Muslim Americans were targeted for violence by "bigoted" Americans.   In fact, there was no backlash against Muslim citizens; this was a trope of the Left, convenient as it fit into their worldview but an outright lie.  While there may have been a few incidents of persons behaving badly, there is no truth to the myth.  There was no wholesale backlash by American citizens against their Muslim neighbors.  There were, however, many Muslims around the world that openly and loudly celebrated the attack on the WTC.  This new show depicts a violent response against Muslim Americans in Dearborn, MI, in the aftermath of the horrific bombing of the Capitol.  So what is the show's obvious political agenda?

Good question.  It may be to depict us all as deplorable racists, as Hillary does on a daily basis.  It may go on to indict us all for our crimes against the Muslim world, as Obama does so often with his slick but un-subtle rhetoric.  Or the series may take a turn towards the actual truth of the world today. 

While the current administration chooses to deny the obvious, the radicals within the Muslim world are on a mission to bring down the West.  It does not matter which self-named group claims credit, there are more of them than Hillary or Obama care to admit.  And they mean business.  No amount of denial is going to alter that reality, as James Comey reiterated Wednesday.  Obama has made us so vulnerable by blaming America for the  the "problems" of the Muslim world,  and Hillary promises to make us vulnerable by importing hundreds of thousands of unvettable refugees from the chaos that is the Middle East. 

Both Obama and Clinton loathe our glorious and selfless military personnel, as they do our men and women in blue.  It will be an adventure to see where this series goes.  If, as hinted in the second episode, it goes on to accuse America and the American people for the seventh century barbarism that has been visited upon parts of the world for the last fourteen hundred years and on America for the last fifteen years, the show will go down.  The American people are sick of being blamed for the monstrous acts of others.  That the Left has done this in a calculating way for the last eight years and think that they have the country under its firm control is infuriating.  Enter Donald Trump.

Is Kiefer Sutherland, executive producer of Designated Survivor, an anti-American moonbat like  Aaron Sorkin, Norman Lear, Michael Moore, Jill Soloway, or Oliver Stone?  We will have to wait and see.  But for any American who has achieved the success that all of these aforementioned opinion-shapers have achieved, to forever display their ingratitude for their success and wealth is truly loathsome. Each and every one of them owes this country a debt of honor.

Marion DS Dreyfus: Creeping Democrat Syndrome Strikes Again

The premise for this highly touted follow-up to Kiefer Sutherland’s epic 24, which strung readers along a finely calibrated weekly precipice of threat  and an agony of suspense is not unpromising. The entire Capitol Hill and the President have been annihilated by a bomb, leaving only lowly HUD Director Thom Kirkman –11^th in line of ascent under normal circumstances -- as the accidental inheritor of the most powerful leader of the free world.

There’s no Senate. The Supreme Court nine are now naught. The country’s capital is in a mess of trouble, with every variety of potential disaster around every executive order or police skirmish.

But no. The writers have given the new president a sullen, obnoxious son, and a sullen, annoying daughter. A gorgeous wife (who punches ‘way beyond her husband’s weight in terms of salient attractiveness point systems in these matters). And a Heinz variety-pak of chief of staff types who mumble against him when his attention is turned elsewhere.

We get, instead of serious dramedy, the purple pangs of  familial discomfort in the new digs, and the huge headache of a Michigan governor who does the Japanese internment thing with his huge Michigander population of Muslims. He arrests a mess of his state’s citizenry, and flouts the new president’s order to release all the detainees. We are given to feel dismay that a young Muslim lad has been manhandled. The horror.

Everything significant is tabled as the Prez Googles and Britannica’s constitutional fixes for the miscreant Mich gov. Who is parodied soberly as the tough guy conservative who jails minorities first, asks questions later.

A veneer of a plot that’s disappointing to a vast loyal one-time army of admirers.

The show’s credibility, now just wrapping its second episode, plummets into inane and unrealistic lefty tropes. Bad enough that Braindead, another once-promising drama featuring the reliably contentious and beloved obsessive/compulsive Tony Shalhoub (Monk), made Republicans of the pols in a story involving pols all evil and controlled by alien bugs, while the heroes and heroines were all Dems or (rarely) Indies. At least that program features literally exploding heads when things got tetchy, and the sidekicks were an active bunch of interesting eccentric sorts.

Here, Sutherland/Kirkman is unsuccored by his cohort colleagues, and the show is headed for the sinking edge of the horizon of unwatchability.

Sutherland deserves better. More important, we deserve better.

A shame. People used to rush home to watch 24.