On Monday night, CBS’ Madam Secretary revealed how Hillary would never have allowed us to get involved in Iraq, and could have prevented the entire disaster had she only been in a position of power to stop it.
Or, something like that.
A little background first. The President --against Madam Secretary’s (Tea Leoni) 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, and 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.
Except this is what real Hillary was saying in the lead up to the Iraq War:
Good times.
