Made FROM TV: CBS's Entertaining Prime Time Fantasy of President Hillary

February 1st, 2016 12:15 AM

Normally, products carry the description of “Made in (insert country),” so that you’ll know and be better able to trace the lineage and origin of that particular product.

However, if Hillary Clinton is the product being signed, sealed, and delivered for you in January of 2017 (and I for one will be aggressively searching out colonization prospects on Mars if that I the case), the “Made In” label attached to her will most likely read “Made in Hollywood.”

Because there will have been no entity or agency, be it corporate, personal, public, or private, that will have labored more diligently to ensure her ascent. Not so much in the sense that they overtly promote her, but in the sense that they arrange entire episodes around shoring up her weaknesses. And CBS has led the way with an entire series dedicated to a fantasy Hillary.

So, in honor of today being the day of the Iowa Caucus, we have decided to catalogue the top 5 ways in which network TV has tried to help Hillary get elected:

#1: CBS’s Madam Secretary sought to ensure us that Hillary would never have left Americans behind to die, when they set up a Benghazi-like scenario.

The main character, Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord (Tea Leoni), who is clearly meant to be portrayed as Hillary, protests leaving a group of American-friendly fighters behind, only to be overruled by the President:

>> 30 seconds to landing zone. Over. 

>> Copy that, Commander. Can you see the package? 

>> Negative. Descending. Oh, wait a second. I have four men at the lz. 

>> Can you visually confirm the package? Over. 

>> Hold. Yes. We have visual confirmation on the package. We're going down.

>> Thank God, it's them. Good call, Bess. 

>> Status, Commander? Over.

>> We're taking fire, ma'am. 

>> From who? Commander? 

>> Taliban. Column with heavy artillery. 

>> Taliban must have been tipped by locals. 

>> Engaging.  Package on the move. Follow him, Pete. 

>> That's Garrity. 

>> Status, Commander? Commander? 

>> We have Garrity, Admiral. Permission to evacuate? Over. 

>> Mr. President? Mr. President?

>> We cannot leave them. We gave them our word. 

>> We got our guy-- we absolutely can and should evacuate now. 

>> The Taliban is still our enemy. We have a Black Hawk with two m-134 miniguns and 30 seals armed to the teeth with m4 carbines! That is more than enough firepower to wipe them out. 

>> We're taking heavy fire! Waiting for orders. Over. 

>> Evacuate. 

>> Get them out of there. Evacuate. Permission to evacuate granted. 

>> Copy that, Admiral. Out. 

>> I can't justify spilling our troops' blood to save them

See what they did there? Had it been up to “Madam Hillary,” everything would be just fine and everyone would be alive.

#2: Madam Secretary reveals how Hillary could have prevented the entire Iraq War if only she had been given access to the intelligence. Where her cunning intellect would have clearly seen the truth that eluded that rube, George W. Bush.

A little background first. The President --against Madam Secretary’s strongly worded advice-- retaliated against Russia for cyber-hijacking Air Force One by launching a cyber-attack on Moscow’s power grid, which caused the whole city to go dark. Except the Russian response, as Madam Secretary of course forewarned, was far more dramatic than expected leaving Madam Hillary as the only one who can now extract us from this inextricably awful specter of war:

General Kohl: We can neutralize the targets in Crimea. Air strikes to follow, to address any aggression on the Ukraine border. And, worst-case scenario, boots on the ground. Just enough to make a point.

Madam Secretary: And what point is that?

General Kohl: That we're willing to use military force.

Madam Secretary: But I thought the point of the power grid attack is that we weren't willing to do that.

Jackson: That was before this latest action.

Madam Secretary: You had to know they would respond.

Jackson: We honestly thought it would be much more measured. This... This is extreme.

President: They escalated, so we have to.

Madam Secretary: Why can't we reach out to our allies?

Jackson: Western Europe's holding us fully accountable. They're blaming us for all of it.

Madam Secretary: Well, of course they are. Because no one knows what's going on. We're still calling Air Force One solar flares.

President: What are you proposing?

Madam Secretary: I want to go before the UN. I want to give them a lay down speech and spell it out for them, step by step. We give evidence of military overreach by Russia against the U.S. And Ukraine. We divulge all of their aggression. The attack on Air Force One, the Poloniumed hacker, the financial records that point to Russian GRU.

Ware: Mr. President, that is a radical roll of the dice. Putting all our cards on the table leaves us nowhere else to turn if the allies don't go for it.

Jackson: Which, given the current climate, I think it's a pretty safe bet they won't.

Madam Secretary: Nowhere else to turn? You mean, as opposed to all those other comfortable options we'll have after we launch a full-scale military campaign against the world's second biggest nuclear power?

Except, her plan to go all-Adlai Stevenson up in here is momentarily put on ice. Or, at the very least altered by her sometimes-DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), sometimes-college professor, and sometimes-religious author husband Henry (Tim Daly), who comes across intelligence claiming that the Russians actually had nothing to do with the cyber-hijacking of Air Force One.

#3 Now ‘Madam Hillary’ can do what real Hillary would love for voters to believe she was doing back in 2002 and 2003...questioning the conventional wisdom, and speaking truth to power:

Madam Secretary: I need you guys to streamline whatever we have that directly links Lasko with the Russians.

Oliver: Primarily it's the money. An e-mail on his computer from a Russian bank-- one associated with GRU-- informing him of a wire transfer to his Cayman Islands bank account.

Madam Secretary: Okay, it says here the NSA was monitoring this bank for criminal activity. So where's the record of a transfer from Russia?

Oliver: Uh... NSA has no corresponding record of a wire transfer. But they're not perfect. It's, you know, often these shady banks have multiple—

Madam Secretary: If NSA has no record of a wire transfer, then how do we know that the e-mail is legitimate?

Oliver: We traced its IP address back to Moscow servers.

Madam Secretary: IP addresses can be faked to look like they come from anywhere.

Oliver: Sure, but it's a convergence of evidence.

Ware: Ma'am, the odds of all this being counterfeit are very slim. It's like he says-- "A convergence of evidence."

Madam Secretary: I heard him. And I'm gonna ask you both to stop saying that. Because "Convergence of evidence" is beginning to sound eerily like the new "Weapons of mass destruction." So, Oliver, I'm gonna ask you again. On the eve of my telling the entire world that Russia is behind the greatest cyber attack in human history, prompting actions that could lead us all into the greatest world conflict in human history-- there's a chance that all the evidence we have here is fake?

Oliver: Yes, ma'am. There is a chance.

See? The people who cause wars are the people who keep Hillary in the dark. Preventing her from doing what she was born to do. Which is end strife and conflict through use of her burning, blinding, beam of intellectual light.

#4 The effort to make sure that vital demos which Hillary will need in 2016 know that they will be valued by a President Clinton. Like in this episode of CBS’s Madam Secretary, when Secretary McCord (Tea Leoni) talks to an African-American woman, Afeni Rahim, who fled to Cuba decades ago because she was falsely accused of murder in the shooting death of a white cop.

You see, in this episode, Madam Secretary makes plain her desire to see the lifting of the embargo on Cuba. Small problem though; a Senator representing Illinois, who is also the key vote Madam Secretary needs to make this work, decides to withhold his vote unless Cuba releases Rahim. It goes badly:

Madam Secretary: Afeni Rahim. It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Secretary...

Afeni: ...Of State Elizabeth Mccord. I'm aware, and you're here because my revolutionary brothers in Havana told your government to stick it where the sun don't shine.

Madam Secretary: Something like that, yeah. Can I have a moment of your time?

Afeni: White folks are always taking my time.

Madam Secretary: I have an opportunity to lift the U.S. Embargo, but I need your help. There are people who want you to come back to the U.S. To serve your sentence. What if I could ensure that you would be at a minimum-security prison close to your daughter in Connecticut? You have a grandson you haven't met. And you would be eligible for parole in three years.

Afeni: Wouldn't that be convenient for you? I simply turn myself over to the Feds, and you get whatever it is you want.

Madam Secretary: Not just me. Don't you think you owe the Cuban people something for taking you in? You could singlehandedly improve their lives.

Afeni: The shooting of Officer Burke? The Chicago cops and the FBI had targeted us, declared us enemies of the State. They killed my friends, wounded me, arrested me, planted evidence, intimidated witnesses. I did not shoot that cop. Never even raised my gun. I'm sorry that he died, but two of my comrades died, too, and nobody is talking about that. He pulled his gun first. We weren't looking for trouble, but that has never stopped a cop from shooting black folks on sight.

Daisy: The all-white jury that sentenced you only took 30 minutes to give you life in prison. That wouldn't happen today.

Afeni: We might have terrible Internet, but we get news. So you tell me-- was it different for Trayvon Martin, or Eric Garner? Is it any different in Ferguson, Missouri, or Charleston, South Carolina? No? I didn't think so.

In the end Madam Secretary convinces Rahim to come back to the United States and face trial after providing her with proof that the FBI buried evidence that would have exonerated her, and appealing to her revolutionary sensibilities by reminding her of the media platform she’ll have to spew her anti-American screed and denounce the United States of America. So, in the end, Madam Secretary not only demonstrated Hillary’s sympathy with the anti-police Black Lives Matter movement, but uses her sympathies with that group to give them an opportunity to trash America, solve an international crisis, and broker a deal that ends the U.S. trade embargo. All in an hour.

But of course, Madam Secretary isn’t the only show fighting the not-so-good-fight.

#5 Another CBS show, The Good Wife, went so far as to award Hillary the Iowa Caucus. As Newsbusters’ Karen Townsend tells it, the Florrick family makes a decision to do the “Full Grassley. Which means shunning computer models and analytics. In order to stop at every campaign site in the State of Iowa that happens to be named “Grassley.”

As Karen describes it in her article:

Describing the Iowa Caucus system as “old style Athenian democracy” to Florrick’s teenage children, complete with a quick swipe at the GOP’s secret ballot system, Ruth points out the other candidates’ corners and supporters. There were no supporters at the Florrick corner, so the troops had to rally to get the necessary 29 voters to prove viability:

Ruth: But Iowans are savvy voters. If we lost some votes, this is our shot to get them back-- right here on the caucus floor.

Grace: Oh, wow. I did not expect it to be this crazy.

Ruth:  Unlike the GOP, Democrats don't do secret ballots. This is old-style Athenian democracy.

Zack: A what?

Ruth: Athenian democracy. Literally, a gathering of neighbors trying to convince each other to support their candidate. Every candidate has a corner. Okay, that's Hillary's corner. (People chanting): Hillary! Hillary! And there's Bernie's. (Chanting): There's no debate. Bernie's great, great, great! Eh, oh, and those are the people for O'Malley. (Chanting): Martin O'Malley! Martin! O'Malley!

Zack: Where's Dad's corner?

Grace: Oh, there it is.

Ruth: Oh... My... God.

Hillary won, of course, and Peter Florrick placed fourth in the Iowa Caucus. Stick a fork in him, he’s done. You didn’t really think CBS would present a scenario showing Hillary as a loser, did you? Not even in a fictional story.