Bill Clinton: I heart Jack Bauer
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- October
- 2
So, former President Bill Clinton opposes torture, but if Jack Bauer were real and, say, shot someone in the kneecap to get the correct information, that might be OK would still be bad.
So he said on Meet the Press this weekend.
This is the conundrum that faces many in 24’s fanbase: Intense love of Jack Bauer and everything 24, but an extreme distaste for the tactics Jack uses if it were real life.
The mitigating factor is that Jack always knows when he’s stepped over the line. And he’s prepared to accept the consequences.
At the start of Season 6, he was brought back from China, where he’d been held for 2 years without speaking or giving up any secrets, solely to be turned over to the terrorists in exchange for them stopping their bombings.
Did he object? No. He had a quick shave and a haircut (gave them to himself, thankyouverymuch) and changed his clothing and got in the van. Sure, he did end up escaping, but, really, only after it was clear that his torture and death was not going to save a single American life.
Clinton had once accepted the idea that perhaps there could be a legal authority to torture in those extraordinarily rare “ticking time bomb” scenarios the show so often depicts. He’s changed his mind:
If you have any kind of a formal exception, people just drive a truck through it, and they’ll say, ‘Well, I thought it was covered by the exception.’ … When Bauer goes out there on his own and is prepared to live with the consequences, it always seems to work better.
Clinton photo, 2006 by Rory Glaeseman / The Journal News/LoHud.com. Kiefer Sutherland photo, Sept. 24, 2007, by Matt Sayles / Associated Press.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 11:39 am by Amy Vernon.
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