How Ridiculous is CBS TV's "Madame Secretary?"

I liked the concept when first I heard CBS was doing a political show.  My enthusiasm waned when I realized the writers hadn't done their homework, had no clue about foreign policy, were   espousing left-leaning social policy and getting their talking points from the DNC.

The photo above is a bit deceptive, including former Clinton Sec. State Madeline Albright in the front row. This is really Hillary Indirect.  On the bright side, Tea Leoni has the right masculine/feminine je ne sais quois while Carradine has his hard-assed presidential role in equal intensity.  Minor characters are interesting and fun enough.  It just sucks that good actors have to front for ignorant uninformed scripts.  Don't those writers read real newspapers?

The big question about the new CBS show “Madame Secretary” is whether it’s the publicity arm of the Hillary Clinton 2016 Campaign. I kind of doubt it’s exactly that, but I wish it were, because it’s ridiculous, just as Clinton’s most outstanding and outrageous failure Foggy Bottom was well… Benghazi, the death of our ambassador to Libya, and three other brave souls. I’ve watched the CBS show one or two times now (I’ve lost count) and I’ve decided two things: 

 1)  It’s a comedy and 2)  I should get a sense of humor.

This TV show is made to laugh at. Madame Secretary is a quasi-Marxist-pro-Iran-anti-Israel Superwoman—a type always in demand on MSM network TV in the year before a national election.

Tea Leoni plays Madame Secretary in the quiet breathy husky voice style of a retired veteran CIA analyst now living on a horse farm.  Suddenly, there appears on the clichéd and dusty road leading to the ranch a parade of SUV’s.  Stepping out of the one in the middle is the POTUS himself. POTUS immediately taps Elizabeth for Secretary of State and, of course, she will step up to save the country from the dark forces of conservatism. Yep, that’s how it’s done folks. That and stuff like the Sec State’s handsome husband explaining philosophical gibberish to his admiring and spellbound students—which is always how it happens in real life, right?

But you can’t have a TV show about Super-Secretary of State without taking on the contemporary political baggage, can you? My favorite and most revealing episode of the heavily left-leaning bent of the show’s writers has two contemporary political issues at its heart:

1     * The XL Pipeline (renamed something else)

        * The Iranian v. U.S. nuclear negotiations in Vienna.

Now the trick is to defend Obama’s failures in each of these areas while playing to the least common denominator of stupidity in the American public. As we know, Obama has stopped the XL Pipeline these past six years to appease his pseudo-environmentalist left-wing supporters, Canada wants the pipeline, preferring to ship oil to its good buddy the U.S. rather than send it west and then offshore to some foreign destination. Even the unions want the pipeline, knowing it could create an estimated 30,000 jobs for people in manufacturing, constructions, and the building trades. 

Yet, the cynical left-wing writers of this dreck and drivel political soap opera provide a scene in which it is revealed that the Pipeline Proposal was entirely the work of “Big Oil” lobbyists and is full of error, outdated information, and outright lies. In the real world, of course, the XL report was written by the EPA and sub-EPAs of the states XL would pass through.  All of them cleared the pipeline, saying it was cleaner, safer, and better for the environment than the oil trains, especially the one that crashed and burned and killed so many people in Canada. 

Apparently the “Madame Secretary” writers do not know any of this.  Big Momma the Sec. State lectures everyone around her on the evils of oil. 

More on the Iranian sub-plot next post –every bit as comic as the bit about the pipeline.  It’s too much celebrity socialism to ingest all at one time.  “Madame Secretary” apostrophe “s” family is whacked, too, cardboard stick figures, very much different than the realistic characterizations of celebrity political/legal offspring in shows like “The Good Wife.”