We stopped watching two weeks ago, when Wayne Palmer (um, and his qualifications to get elected president are...?) was going to proceed with the nuclear strike against "the terrorist's country" (which shall remain nameless - "24" wouldn't want to imply any specific foreigners are bad! Dumb plot twist - and dumber now that I learned he was bluffing.

"24" has always had to walk the line between stuffing action into every episode and recognizing what could happen in an actual day. Season 4 was mostly enjoyable, but got a bit silly when the crashing of a train, the attempt to melt down all nuclear reactors in the US, and the downing of Air Force One with the president on board are ALL diversions from the terrorists' "real plan." But this season has been riddled with writers' ADD. All the plot streams they set up in the premier that were to deal with the tradeoff between freedom and security have been dumped, the relevant characters killed or abandonned after two or three episodes -- which is to say, in the course of repeated terrorist attacks across the country, such questions or people would only be interesting for a couple of HOURS. And then we are supposed to want to meet new people, and address new crises -- even though we haven't even finished with the mindboggling huge ones we started with?

Worst of all, this season is essentially a remake of season 2 - nuclear threat in L.A. causes President Palmer's cabinet to doubt his abilities and seek to remove him from power, so that the V.P. can launch a military response against an unnamed host country. Thus it's clear that the writers and producers have run out of ideas -- but only in the terrorism department. Last season's brilliance showed the show can be MORE compelling when it's a political thriller, not a torturous (in both senses, now) action machine.

In fact, if I would have loved to have seen a whole "day" of Jack getting out of the Chinese prison. That would have been interesting and different, and would have let the terrorism plots lay fallow for a season. The show isn't called "CTU," so that bizarre, backbiting, pinched-sphincter of a workplace (where nobody trusts anybody, inside or out, apparently) doesn't have to even be in a season. We like Jack - maybe we did until last week - and seeing him at work is what we have tuned in for. But if we've already seen it, and it's poorly executed to boot, then we will take the season 3 perogative and just wait for another day.

"But Feldman's Americans are not the kind who stand for hours at a Lincoln-Douglas debate, who ever ask their politicians to substantively persuade them of the rightness of ideas or weigh arguments in the voting booth."

Yes, it's true. The Americans who voted in the last two presidential elections (and arguably the midterms in 2002) are not like the voters who weighed the consequences of slavery for the future of the country. Half of them and more, at least, based their vote on "whom they'd like to have a beer with" (2000), who was not easily morphed into Osama bin Laden or totally gay for gay marriage (2002), and who was the manly man who was stalwart against tyranny rather than "sensitive" (2004).

Democrats won in 2006 for two reasons: Reality finally started to catch up Republican frames, and Democrats realized that language matters and started framing issues better themselves. That's what Obama is doing, and he does it well. The fact of the matter is, people -- voters -- are distrustful of specific policy proposals, in part because they find them hard to understand (and policy is hard, that's why we hire politicians to work them out), but moreso because almost never does a candidate's policy proposal get enacted once in office.

Clinton knew in 1992, and Republicans learned in 1994, that people want a sense that candidates care about the things they do, and that their policy initiatives are related to a broader moral sense of the universe. I would even go so far as to say that often it doesn't matter if you agree with that specific moral universe (as with both Clinton and, to a lesser degree, Bush), as long as there is some feeling that the policy is a piece in a bigger picture.

To wit: somehow, how Obama discusses violence is shallow, but "freedom is on the march" and "I trust the people, not the government" is substantial presentation of policy specifics?

Framing is not Pavlovian, but it does take language seriously as a primary factor in the way we make decisions -- which, apologies to both the right and the left, is not as rational actors with clearly defined choices, but as people with a mixed-up jumble of priorities fighting for attention. Good politicians know how to make one or two of those priorities -- their priorities -- stand out in a distinct way, and that's what language, and framing, does.

It is interesting that Fairbanks had to go back to before the Civil War to find citizens engaged in a substantial political discussion over things that matter in the country. Of course, that time, they still elected Douglas, the pro-slavery candidate, as the Senator from Illinois....

NanananaNananananana -- AG!

Boy, that mild-mannered secret identity as an incompetent political toady he uses sure had me fooled. I would have never guessed he was Batman. Or is he Superman? No, um, maybe...Aquaman? One of the Wonder Twins? That weird monkey they hung out with?

Anyway, I'm sure his mommy thinks he's the #1 crime fighter!