Department of Bad Arguments (and Even Worse Baseball Analogies)

It’s not about “progressive values”:  Democrats, PLEASE stop saying that.  The only values at issue here are democracy, or not; fairness, or not; a functioning government, or not; keeping working- and middle-class Americans out of poverty, or not; preserving Social Security and Medicare, or not.

It’s not about economics: it’s about greed.  “We can’t afford it” sounds like a good reason to slash government programs, but is it true?  Under our Constitution the congress holds the power of the purse; and successive Congresses have appropriated funds for — among other things — the Internal Revenue Service; the Department of Education; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the State Department and USAID.  If the executive can, of its own accord, decide whether or not to spend that money, why do we need congress to pass a budget?  More important: WHERE IS THAT MONEY GOING?  Because it’s going somewhere.  It’s not going to sit in a magical Treasury vault.  (Hint: every time Trump takes a long weekend golfing, his resorts bill the Secret Service at a “special” rate.)

It’s not about government efficiency: it’s about no government.  Every adult American knows that April 15 is the deadline for filing annual tax returns; so April 9, surely, is a good time for the IRS to be without leadership.  The IRS staff fired by the “efficiency experts” are, by and large, the ones tasked with auditing corporations and the very wealthy — not the ordinary citizens who are still expected to pay.  It’s not complicated: government services cost money, and that money comes from taxes.  Fire the collectors, and government starves.  It’s self-fulfilling in the worst possible way.

It’s not about building the middle class: it’s about feeding the rich.  See above.  The people born on third base pretend that the rest of us are just too lazy to hit a triple, and that the best corrective for poverty is to not be poor.  How?  Reincarnation is one way; the rich paying their share for the freedoms and infrastructure they enjoy — and which further enrich them — is another.

It’s not about creating a new golden age: it’s about a return to the Gilded Age.  Trump likes to say that the United States was wealthier in the 1890s and early 1900s than at any other time, before or since, and that’s because the government was funded by “tariffs” and not taxes.  Let’s cut the bullshit: tariff is a fancy word for “sales tax” — the most regressive form of taxation.  Anyone who thinks tariffs are paid by foreign governments, or by the overseas corporations selling goods in the US, wasn’t paying attention in sixth grade.  There is no (legal) force on earth that can compel foreign governments to pony up to the US tax authorities — if there are any left.

It’s not about smaller government: it’s about killing government.   Grover Norquist famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”  With tax collection crippled, the Department of Justice thoroughly compromised, and the FBI so enfeebled that wild-eyed liberals might wish for the return of J Edgar Hoover, America is on the verge of becoming a failed state, like Haiti or Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan.  That might not be the legacy we want to leave future generations.

It’s not about improving people’s lives: it’s about avarice, hatred, and laziness. Trump’s appeal seems to be that he “hates the people you hate”: his contempt validates his voters.  And even more than in his first term, the policies — such as they are — have the “shoot first, ask questions later” quality that everyone should have expected.  There is no process (unless you call ChatGPT queries a “process”); there is only executive fiat — the governing mode favored by Tito, Mussolini, Hitler, Saddam, and — let’s be clear — Putin.  This is not democracy, and it does not serve the people.

It’s not about enacting policy: it’s about creating chaos.   In the United States in 2025, there is no real policy agenda, and no real policy.  In the United States, policies exist to serve the people — we can disagree, and often have, about whether the policy can, will, or does meet its stated objective.  Instead, today, we have chaos: an unchecked president who invokes emergency powers, sows worldwide economic calamity, and alienates allies who have stood by our nation proudly for eighty years and more, while a pliant congress looks the other way and a complicit judiciary nods in approval.

It’s not about taxing foreign governments: it’s about smoke and mirrors.  Watch what they do, not what they say.  Pay attention to the reality of what is happening, and how.  A 104% tariff imposed (for example) on “all goods coming from China” is not paid by Chinese industry, nor by the Chinese government, nor by anyone in China.  It is paid by the purchaser of those goods: the American consumer of toys, costume jewelry, power tools, and more.  Food; appliances large and small; batteries for those toys; accessories for those power tools.  The Administration can claim all it wants that foreign governments pay; the Administration is lying.

And finally: It’s not about being an All-Star hitter, Democrats:  You are watching every pitch go by.  Elsewhere in DC the Chief Justice — who told us, in his confirmation hearing, that judges are just calling balls and strikes, either is asleep at the plate or isn’t the impartial umpire he claimed to be.

Unconventional Wisdom

A common complaint of the last eight years has been that the media establishment — not to mention the Democratic Party — continue to normalize the antidemocratic and authoritarian ravings of the Republican Party in general, and of its standard-bearer in particular. Note to Democrats, Independents, and even Republicans — especially those who have had enough of the antics and the chaos: You cannot use the traditional playbook, and its social niceties, when the opposing candidate has thrown everything in the gutter. Common decency and the customary social decorum? Sorry, but this is not how you will win this election.

Let’s start with the obvious: Trump is not normal. He is not a normal candidate, and he is not by any stretch of the imagination a normal person. (Donald, if you and your campaign are reading this: that’s not a compliment. Rules, including the rules of decorum and diplomacy, exist for a reason. You’re not actually that smart.) So let’s stop pretending that just because he is going to be the Republican candidate this cycle, we should treat him as a normal candidate and accord him the same respect and privileges that traditionally attach. No. No! He is a convicted felon; he stands accused — very credibly — of mishandling national security information; he is also under indictment, in two jurisdictions, for conspiring to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. These are not small things, and we should not magick them away simply because an entire political party would rather sink the nation, if they can call the shots, than abide by the rules and institutions that have guided us for 250 years. (Republicans: you only think you’re going to call the shots. Your nominee has demonstrated, time and time again, that he doesn’t really give a damn about you. You think you can cut him loose, but you can’t. He won’t think twice about cutting you loose, though.)

Another elephant in the room: Biden’s performance in the CNN debate has sent both the Democratic back room and chattering classes into a kind of sugar-fueled frenzy, speculating wildly about replacing the candidate. Memo to the New York Times editorial board: it’s never going to happen, and if it does it will be an electoral disaster. (Don’t think for a moment that Trump will thank you. His memory isn’t that long, and anyway he doesn’t care.) Biden shouldn’t have even proposed the debate, but that damage has been done and the job now is to contain it — and throwing the candidate overboard is not damage control. So let’s jump ahead to the next debate, and how Biden should — and should not — prepare for it.

Conventional wisdom says that you don’t acknowledge your opponent; you don’t mention his name; you don’t talk about his positions. You talk about yourself: your policy positions, your achievements while in office, the things you want to accomplish in the next term. You show empathy with the voters: you understand their needs, their pain, their worries. You demonstrate a command of the issues, of the law, of history, of facts. Conventional wisdom is for normal times, and normal candidates, and normal political parties. These are not normal times, and the Republican Party and its candidate are anything but normal players in our democratic system. So instead of tossing your candidate overboard: dump the conventional wisdom, It’s not going to help — and it’s what got Biden and his campaign team in trouble.

Here’s the unconventional wisdom: Focus on Trump. Make every question about Trump. Make every answer about Trump. Use your opening statement to catalog the things Trump has done. Remind voters about all the things Trump didn’t do. Ask Trump (since the moderators are evidently too timid and too polite) what he was doing for those three hours that the Capitol was under attack. Then recount the witness testimony of what he was doing: watching television in his dining room, and agreeing with the “Hang Mike Pence” chant. Don’t just tell us how awful and abnormal his behavior is: show us.

Show us how he made a laughing stock of the United States. Show us how, under Trump, people suffered. Show us how foreign leaders — including our closest allies — began making plans for a world without the United States. Show us how we’ve gone from being the Indispensable Nation to the Unreliable Ally. Remind us that NATO is an alliance, not a protection racket; and that the President of the United States must be a statesman and diplomat; and that diplomats and American presidents do not use the cadences and vernacular of mob bosses. High office demands dignity, and dignity is more than temporarily straightening out of your slouch, sucking in your gut, and saying, “See? Dignified!”

Remind us that this election is not for student body president, and that this is no place for the cool kids, the party kids, the popular kids, and — especially — the bullies, the obnoxious blusterers whose bravado fronts for cowardice.

The best debate prep for Biden, in September, is not three days at Camp David studying briefing books and facing Bob Bauer as a mock-Trump. Instead of three days, spend two hours in the White House screening room rewatching “The American President.” There’s plenty there you can use. (I’ve cited some examples here, here, and here. There are plenty more.)

And for the rest of us, who were wigging out late Wednesday night: try to relax. Here’s some post-game commentary that you probably haven’t already heard, but it’s well worth taking in:

Wigging Out

Like so many people this evening, I find myself trying not to panic after the debate on CNN. It was folly for President Biden to even suggest it: he would have been far better off if he had said, simply, “I will not share the stage with rapists or criminals. I will not elevate the status of a man who lies more easily than some people breathe, who subverts our democracy, who sat by and watched television while our national legislature was attacked. I will not dignify him.”

The President chose not to do that; he believed, apparently, that this would be an opportunity. And now Democrats, as well as Republican never-Trumpers, are wondering: how do we deal with this? How do we recover? How do we shut down this existential threat, once and for all.

The list of contributors to this debacle — the people who brought this country to this crisis — is a long one. Pride of place must go to Mitch McConnell, whose cynicism ensured that Trump could — and would — run again, when he torpedoed the second impeachment. He (correctly) blamed Trump for the violence, but deferred the Senate trial until after Biden’s inauguration. And then voted not to convict, on the convenient grounds that Trump was no longer president. So thank you, Senator. May you rot.

Of course McConnell is not the only Republican profile in cowardice; and we can, if we want, trace the trouble all the way back to the original Baron of Blowhard, the Prince of Putrescence, the Duke of Disingenuousness. I refer, of course, to Newt Gingrich, who thirty years ago convinced his party that politics was not the art of the possible, after all: compromise be damned, if you are not with us you are un-American. I should not have to point out how undemocratic this idea is. So, Newt: you can rot, too.

None of this is actually what I came to say. Or, rather, it is a necessary preface. For the last ninety minutes I have been thinking about what I wish the moderators had done — for example, been more forceful about saying, “You still haven’t answered the question or even gone near it.” We were an hour in before that started to happen. I’m not alone.

I have been thinking, too, about what I wish Biden had said. What I wish his opening statement had been. He was at his best tonight when he got angry and called Trump a liar, and a felon. When he reminded people that Trump is a whiner, a perpetual victim, a cheat. He should have gone further.

It is axiomatic that any presentation has three parts: Tell them what you’re going to say; say it; tell them what you said. In that spirit, I submit the following opening statement: the one I wish Biden had delivered.

My fellow Americans: this is not simply an historic election, it is the most consequential one any of us has ever seen, or likely will see. The man standing across the stage from me is a liar, a conman, an adjudicated sex offender and a convicted felon. I do not say these things lightly — indeed, I believe that it is beneath the dignity of my office to be on the stage with such a man at all; it is beneath the dignity of my office to even have to say these things. But here we are, and these things must be said.

It must be said: this man lies. You will hear him lie countless times in the next ninety minutes, because everything he says is a lie. You can — if you pay close attention — catch him in it, because he will contradict himself many times tonight. He will answer a question one way, and state as fact things that are not true; and in his next answer, or the next, state as fact things that are neither true nor consistent with his previous statements.

This man has no morals, no scruples, no conscience. No code of honor, no sense of decency, and no idea what America is really about. To him this is all about self-preservation, and about preserving the carefully curated foundational lie that he is a successful businessman and some kind of genius. He is not: he has declared bankruptcy six times; he has mismanaged casinos out of business. A genius? Forrest Gump could make money managing a casino; Donald Trump put himself out of business.

This man will insist that he is a victim, that he is the most persecuted individual who has ever walked the earth, that nobody has ever been treated worse. He said on one occasion that he has been treated worse than Jesus; on another, that Lincoln was treated better than Trump. These statements are obviously false. But he said them. And one minute and fifteen seconds from now he will deny that he ever said any such thing. And that, too, will be a lie.

This man lied to you over 30,000 times while he was in office. These lies are documented. He will deny it; he will claim he is a victim: that the newspapers hate him, and falsely report that he lied. He told you, in 2016, that his administration would be “only the best people.” The best people he hired have all left him, and to a man (and woman) say that he should never be near the Oval Office again. He will deny that they said that, or he will insist that he fired them because they were not the best people after all. Or both.

I stand before you a man of 81; the man across from me is himself 78. He will tell you that I am too old and frail for this job; and if that is so, so is he. He will project confidence, he will bluster. It is easy to project confidence when you don’t care about the truth, when your only concern is staying out of prison. He will tell you that his legal problems are all “put up jobs” by his political opponents. Another lie: his legal problems have but one sole cause, and that is the reprehensible and immoral conduct of the man himself. He falsified his books to hide facts that could have helped voters understand the truth about him. To hear him tell it, he has never, ever, in his life, been responsible for anything. That is an enviable thing: which of you can say the same? He is an endless, perpetual victim. So he says.

Do not believe him. For he is not the victim: you are. Of his lies, of his moral rot, of his disdain for truth, of his lifelong belief that he alone should be above the law, and above any reckoning.

Yes, I am old; and I have spent my entire life in public service, trying to improve the lives of the people of Delaware and of the United States. My opponent has spent his life in self-service. It has been a life of fraud and deception. It’s easy to say the words you want people to believe; but leadership is about speaking truth, and telling people what they need to know.

Beware: every word he says is a lie. Do not become his next victims.

Having delivered this message, President Biden could more easily have turned all of Trump’s answers against him: “The question was about income inequality and how you would address it, not about how smart you think you are.”

He might even have delivered the opening statement, again, as his closing argument.

Cheap Talk About “Justice” and “Peace”

A friend asked me today for my thoughts about the “unrest” (my word) on the Columbia campus: the pro-Palestinian protests, the University calling out the NYPD to clear the trespassers from the South Lawn, the evident rise of antisemitism and intolerance generally.  She, like so many people of conscience capable of non-linear thought, does not know what to think.

The events at Columbia — and at other schools, in New York City and throughout the nation — anger and frustrate me on multiple levels:

  1. Call me old fashioned, or a wooly-headed idealist, or both: the beneficiaries of a liberal education should, first and foremost, know how to think.  So kids, please: THINK.  The picket lines (in front of The New School, on Fifth avenue); the drum circles (NYU students in Washington Square Park) and the tent cities (Columbia) with their brave leaders, faces wrapped in a keffiyeh to show solidarity and provide anonymity, are not engaged in any constructive endeavor.  Theirs is a knee-jerk, emotional reaction to a bad situation — a situation that is largely, at this point, of Israel’s own making.
  2. Addressing the protesters: What do you want?  What would be a good outcome?  What does your endgame look like?  What are your actual demands, bearing in mind the following:
  • Words like “justice” and “peace” — or slogans like, “no justice, no peace!” — do not express anything beyond the inchoate.
  • Define what you mean by “justice” while acknowledged if you please, the complexity of the world.  Things are not black-and-white, especially in the Middle East (checkered keffiyeh notwithstanding).
  • When you chant things like, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!” What is it you mean?  Do you understand that you are repeating an antisemitic, genocidal slogan?  Do you know what river, and what sea?  Have you looked at a map?
  • President Shafik: I don’t envy you; but this is what you get paid for.
  • Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator Ted Cruz, and the rest of the GOP clown car: not everything is an opportunity for your performative outrage.  If you spent even half as much time trying to understand problems and craft solutions as you do whining about them, the world might be in better shape.

    • It occurred to me, as I walked around the city a few days ago — not in search of the protests, but encountering them — that these students are imitating the behavior modeled by too many politicians: a lot of talk about intractable problems with no real answers on offer.  H.L. Mencken was right: for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong.

    These problems have been with us for generations, at least; they will not be solved by the Speaker of the House dropping in at Columbia “to fire the president” — which he manifestly lacks the power or authority to do.  They will not be solved by the senator from Texas bemoaning the “cultural Marxism” that has taken root on our university campuses.  And they will not be solved by the gentleladies from Georgia, North Carolina, and Colorado, and the gentlemen and ladies from points between and beyond, whose only abiding interest in the nation’s problems seems to be telling the rest of us who’s to blame and why we should be very, very afraid.

    I don’t want to suggest that I have all the answers, or indeed any answers: I don’t.  I do, however, believe in dialog and compromise.   Solving problems begins with more listening, and less talking.  It’s the main lesson I took away from my liberal arts education, from my teachers at schools that include Columbia.

    Slogans are easy; work is hard.  And no difficult problem was ever resolved by a clever slogan.

    Pesah, 2024

    There was an extra guest at this year’s seder: the elephant in the room was not Elijah (who came and went, unseen, as always) but rather Benjamin Netanyahu, whose specter hung over us all, a Marley’s Ghost for the vernal equinox.  At the start, and before we formally began the service, our leader asked us to think about the crisis in Gaza and encouraged us to ask any questions — any at all.  I am not sure what to make of the fact that none were voiced: was everyone in agreement (whatever that might mean)?  Perhaps people did not want to cast a further pall over the occasion, usually one of joy and celebration.

    Whatever the reason, Gaza and Israel cannot have been far from anyone’s thoughts.  The Haggadah tells the story of Exodus; it recounts a people’s struggle for freedom from slavery and oppression — in just those words.  And more:

    We have dedicated this festival tonight to the dream and the hope of freedom, the dream and the hope that have filled the hearts of men from the time our Israelite ancestors went forth out of Egypt. People have suffered, nations have struggled to make this dream come true. Now we dedicate ourselves to the struggle for freedom. Though the sacrifice be great and the hardships many, we shall not rest until the chains that enslave all men be broken.

    So far so good; or maybe a little close to home, this year.  It goes on:

    But the freedom we strive for means more than broken chains. It means liberation from all those enslavements that warp the spirit and blight the mind, that destroy the soul even though they leave the flesh alive. For men can be enslaved in more ways than one.

    Men can be enslaved to themselves. When they let emotion sway them to their hurt, when they permit harmful habits to tyrannize over them — they are slaves. When laziness or cowardice keeps them from doing what they know to be the right, when ignorance blinds them so that, like Samson, they can only turn round and round in meaningless drudgery — they are slaves. When envy, bitterness and jealousy sour their joys and darken the brightness of their contentment — they are slaves to themselves and shackled by the chains of their own forging.

    It’s not a bad description of Bibi, raging blindly and bringing the Temple down on his own head.  For a long time I thought that the greatest threat to the continued existence of the State of Israel was the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are able to dictate so much policy while avoiding — for example — the military service required of every other citizen.  I stand corrected: it is Bibi Netanyahu, who will sacrifice the nation’s interests to ensure his own political (and perhaps personal) survival.

    Men can be enslaved by intolerance. When Jews are forced to give up their Jewish way of life, to abandon their Torah, to neglect their sacred festivals, to leave off rebuilding their ancient homeland — they are slaves….

    How deeply these enslavements have scarred the world! The wars, the destruction, the suffering, the waste! Pesah calls us to be free, free from the tyranny of our own selves, free from the enslavement of poverty and inequality, free from the corroding hate that eats away the ties which unite mankind.

    Here in the United States, we have long been enslaved by intolerance; it might have had its roots in the Original American Sin of slavery, but even 160 years after the Civil War we struggle: the movement that buried Jim Crow still has a lot of work to do.  Everyone sees the need, but nobody wants to do the actual work.

    Work is hard; talk is cheap, and easy.

    Judicial Temperament

    It will come as no surprise to those who know me, and those few who follow this blog, that the shameful, shameless decision of the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has been on my mind. As a participant in two unplanned pregnancies I am no stranger to abortion, and it’s fair to say that my life would be quite different in a world without the procedure. I’ve joked to my friends at Planned Parenthood that the so-called right to life movement (right to birth is closer to the truth — and “forced birth,” closer still) is the best friend they have: my monthly contribution increases every time a GOP Congress (or a benighted state legislature somewhere) approves repressive legislation. I have nothing but contempt for the contemptible men and the one woman who wrote and signed on to Dobbs. It upends long-established norms of personal liberty, effectively revoking a recognized right of individuals to make their most intimate decisions without state interference.

    The Roberts court — whether the Chief Justice likes it or not — will forever be known as the place where individual liberty goes to die. The three most recent appointees flat out lied to the Senate when they said, “Roe v. Wade is settled law.” Settled law is settled: it’s not up for review. What they meant is, “It’s settled law until we have the votes to unsettle it.” Well, they have the votes. They have the power. And they have upended the very first thing every first-year law student learns about principles of judicial construction: stare decisis is the bedrock on which the common law is built; if people are going to rely on the rule of law (meaning, in no small part, what a judge says the law is) they have to rely on its consistency. It can’t change at the drop of a hat, or with the shifting winds, or when the balance of appointments to the Supreme Court reaches a tipping point. David Souter, when he met with the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing, made exactly this point: I might not personally agree with the decision, he said, but it is the law and a rule by which people have been able to order their lives for decades; we can’t just overturn it because we don’t like it. If only Justice Souter were still on the bench.

    Let it sink in: An arrogant group of unelected jurists decided to abolish a long-established individual right. They say that Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided” — not for its conclusion (which they abhor) but for its logic. Trouble is, that’s an arbitrary metric when we’re fifty years in. They did what they did because they could, not because of any conviction that the logic of Roe was flawed (and in that much, I’ll agree — not so much as to Roe as to Griswold v. Connecticut, which found the right to privacy not in the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”) but in “emanations and penumbras” around, among other things, the Fourth Amendment (searches and seizures) and the Fourteenth (applying the Bill of Rights to the states).

    Let this sink in, too: the Dobbs decision very directly jeopardizes other rights we take for granted. Much has been made of Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion, suggesting that decisions establishing other rights he disdains might also now be safely reversed. These rights include things that are by and large no longer controversial: same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, the use of contraception. May he Court begin, then, not with Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) — which ensured the right to use contraception — but with Loving v. Virgina (1967) — which struck down anti-miscegenation statutes. The arc of history is long, and it bends towards karma.

    Blasphemy

    A link showed up in my email this morning: There’s No Hate Like Christian Love. Provocative, I thought, but damned if it isn’t bang-on, and something that I’ve been thinking (if not actually saying) for decades. Curious, I clicked. The tone was a bit harsh and strident, the language blunt, and the generalizations sweeping and overstated. But I don’t think he’s wrong: I think he’s dead right.

    My friends of faith (and I have at least a few) will not, I think, argue with the essential message there: Bible-thumping makes good street theatre, but it’s a crap basis for public policy and not “religion” — as a person of faith might understand it — at all. It stands principle on its head, so that “Love thy neighbor” becomes, “My neighbor must love me.” If Jake next door doesn’t love me as I love myself: well, that’s intolerable.

    Someone recently said to me that religion is what’s left when God has left the building. I think that’s about as perfect a distillation as there can be. “Moreover,” she said, “God was never in a building.”

    I could go on about this but I don’t see the need, except to say this: It’s not all people of faith, by any means; it is (and here my own generalization sweeps wide) the ones who proclaim their faith most loudly. There is no zealot like a convert; and the fanatic is always harboring a secret doubt. They should listen more, most of all to their secret inner voices that they work so hard to suppress.

    Dialog (like charity, I suppose) begins at home.

    Picard

    We are now midway through the second season of Picard on Paramount Plus — the further adventures, if you will, of Jean-Luc Picard, Admiral, Retired, fourteen years after he left Starfleet and twenty or so since we last saw him aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise.

    My impressions: this second season is better than the first: this is typical of episodic television, for it takes the writers (and their actors) some time to settle into the groove of their characters. The Picard writers had a head start: known quantities, more or less, in Picard himself and in Seven of Nine, but they still had twenty years of backstory to catch up. The writing is tighter, the story is better, and the CG “scenery” is less distracting than it was during Season 1, where the virtual control panels of La Sirena (and every other starship, Borg cube, and laboratory in the galaxy) called far too much attention to themselves by their mere presence: actors putting their hands up to mime actions that will be filled in later, twisting nonexistent knobs and pushing nonexistent buttons.

    Because this is the age of binge watching, and because I could, I went back and re-watched Season 1: both to remind myself how we got here, and to refresh my memory about what I disliked about it. Surprise: it wasn’t as bad as I recalled. The plot made more sense the second time around, the virtual reality controls were less distracting, and I could appreciate the story arc in ways I did not a year ago. I was, as I said, pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful (as I had remembered it).

    That said: here’s a note for all you writers and producers, and aspiring writers and producers: If I have to watch it twice through to really appreciate it, you’ve failed. Maybe it’s me, but I just don’t think I should have to work that hard for my entertainment. Things should be clear the first time — sure, a second viewing might increase my appreciation, or reveal little Easter eggs that I hadn’t theretofore noticed; but it shouldn’t be a requirement.

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