Janeane Garofalo’s Convenient Ethic$

You all read American Girl In Italy’s takedown of Janeane Garofalo in “‘this is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks’.” Now, via The Right Scoop, we have a mash-up of Ms. Garofalo’s wildly inconsistent — and might I add anti-democratic? — thoughts on the importance of dissent:

Ms. Garofalo’s inconsistencies go further than dissent, as you’ll see below:

She was one of the loudest, most vociferous opponents to the Iraq War and to the torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other U.S. bases. In 2003, on her Air America radio show, she called Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales the “torture czar.”

Yet, she works for “24,” a series that glamorizes the most degrading and excruciating forms of torture shown graphically in nearly every episode.

Last year, I wrote an article about “24,” based on the extraordinary dissection of the series’ ethical problems by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, who will be Larry Johnson’s guest on No Quarter Radio soon.

… Jane Mayer wrote a critical article about 24’s misuse of torture, wrongly portrayed as a reliable method for extracting information and confessions.

So why does Garofalo, such a vocal opponent of torture and “rednecks” like Rush Limbaugh, work for a show that glorifies torture and whose creator and executive producer is VBFs with Rush Limbaugh?

The money. The job! It’s amazing how plenty of moolah and a steady acting gig can affect one’s moral values, especially Janeane Garofalo’s:

From Mayer’s thorough examination of “24″:

Each season of “24,” which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer—a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland—must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process—allowing a terrorist plot to proceed—or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.

It makes sense that the conservative Jon Voight, who campaigned for Rudy Giuliani, is guest-starring on this series. But Garofalo, who has NO tolerance for the right?

In fact, here’s Garofalo in 2003 on how to treat ANYONE to her right:

Reaching out to find common ground with political opponents? Building bridges? “That’s over,” she declared. “I don’t have any desire to build a bridge with an antigay evangelist who supports war and the death penalty and actually believes the tsunami was God’s retribution. … The bridge has been blown up.”

“That’s OVER,” she says! Well, alrighty then.

Except that Joel Surnow, the guy who personally hired Garofalo and writes her sizeable pay checks, is a dyed-in-the-wool redneck-lovin’ ‘winger. Hell, he’s a a typical “teabaggin’ redneck” who LOVES Rush Limbaugh (!). But, despite her protestations to “building bridges” with such people, Janeane has NO problem consorting with Surnow or taking his money. To see how incongruous this is, check out Jane Mayer’s description of Surnow:

The office desk of Joel Surnow—the co-creator and executive producer of “24,” the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox—faces a wall dominated by an American flag in a glass case. A small label reveals that the flag once flew over Baghdad, after the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. A few years ago, Surnow received it as a gift from an Army regiment stationed in Iraq; the soldiers had shared a collection of “24” DVDs, he told me, until it was destroyed by an enemy bomb. “The military loves our show,” he said recently. Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coiled energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped, and he has a “soul patch”—a smidgen of beard beneath his lower lip. When he was young, he worked as a carpet salesman with his father. The trick to selling anything, he learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He’s got it down. “People in the Administration love the series, too,” he said. “It’s a patriotic show. They should love it.”

Surnow’s production company, Real Time Entertainment, is in the San Fernando Valley, and occupies a former pencil factory: a bland, two-story industrial building on an abject strip of parking lots and fast-food restaurants. Surnow, a cigar enthusiast, has converted a room down the hall from his office into a salon with burled-wood humidors and a full bar; his friend Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-radio host, sometimes joins him there for a smoke. (Not long ago, Surnow threw Limbaugh a party and presented him with a custom-made “24” smoking jacket.) The ground floor of the factory has a large soundstage on which many of “24” ’s interior scenes are shot, including those set at the perpetually tense Los Angeles bureau of the Counter Terrorist Unit, or C.T.U.—a fictional federal agency that pursues America’s enemies with steely resourcefulness. …

You’d think that Garofalo, who regularly railed against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al. for promoting torture and extraordinary rendition — as do we here at this blog — would be repelled by such a man who adores pro-torture advocates like Limbaugh. But no.

It must be morally confusing to Garofalo’s fans who, for years, have heard her condemnations of the Bush Administration’s torture practices and treatment of detainees.

Here’s more from Jane Mayer’s article in the New Yorker that wrongly leads TV viewers to buy into the “ticking time bomb” theory that surely Janeane Garofalo knows is a bunch of tripe. The “ticking time tomb” scenario the kind of c-r-a-p on “24″ that infuriates real-life counterterrorism experts like Larry Johnson. “24″ is replete with hyped, false portrayals of the Hollywood-created dramatic device:

["24"'s main premise is] its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the “ticking time bomb” plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show’s “trick.”) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously—frequently on a split screen—and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.

Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.” … Read all.

But the dangerous premise of the “ticking time bomb” — which wrongly influences millions of Americans to believe it’s true and that torture is the only reliable tool in counterterrorists’ arsenal — is not an issue for Ms. Garofalo. Because there’s a paycheck involved.

If you’ve got a yen for more Garofalo mockery, check out Hot Air’s “Video: Red Eye, Mark Levin, Fox & Friends dump all over Olby and Garofalo.”

And don’t miss this report, sent to me by American Girl:

Ha! That CNN reporter nut is taking a break! ’bout time, CNN!