Partly in response to criticism that West Wing plots tended to represent conservative viewpoints as misguided at best and downright dumb at worst, Producer/Writer team Tommy Schlamme and Aaron Sorkin brought two Republican consultants, Marlin Fitzwater and Peggy Noonan, onboard to in order present a more balanced view of things. In spite of that move the first three episodes of The West Wing have been anything but non-partisan, and right-wing hackles have been raised.
During "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen II", the second part of the two-part season Premiere, Wing writers and producers annoyed a good many gun rights advocates in a scene where Press Secretary CJ Cregg, during a briefing, relates the Presidential shooting to the gun control issue. "There were 36 homicides last night," CJ says to a room full of reporters at an official press briefing. "480 sexual assaults," she continues, "3,411 robberies, 3,685 aggravated assaults, all at gunpoint. And if anyone thinks those crimes could have been prevented if the victims themselves had been carrying guns, I'd only remind you that the President of the United States himself was shot last night while surrounded by the best trained armed guards in the history of the world."
Everything from the whether a real-world CJ Cregg would've been able to get her hands on those stats that fast, to the validity of the analogy has been condemned by people upset that so far The West Wing has been more blatently left-political than it has been in the past. And if that didn't get right-wing blood boiling, last week's episode "The Midterms" surely did.
Towards the end of the episode, a thinly-veiled fictional version of Dr. Laura Schlesinger was publicly humiliated by President Bartlet. Noticing her as he was addressing a gathering of media hosts, he takes the opportunity to get a few things off his chest. "You're Dr. Jenna Jacobs, right?" he asks, mid-speech. He proceeds to query her on exactly what discipline confers her "Doctor" status. It turns out that her degree is in English Literature. (Real-life radio host Laura Schlesinger has also been criticized for using the name "Dr. Laura" on her radio call-in show due to the fact that her degree is in physiology, not psychiatry or psychology.) Bartlet goes on to mock-agree with Jacobs' contention that homosexuality is an abomination as per old-testament writings, and carries the argument to its logical, absurd extreme. Should Old Testament laws be our modern-day moral standard, he notes, we would still be able to sell our daughters into slavery and kill the neighbour who works on the sabbath. His biblical onslaught leaves "Dr. Jenna" speechless.
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