The West Wing Is Not a Wet Dream.

• Author: McKissack, Fred

The response by conservatives to NBC's The West Wing (Wednesday, 9 P.M. Eastern) is so comical that I almost feel compelled to defend the show. The Weekly Standard ran a cover story calling it "Left Wing," and John Leo of U.S. News & World Report piled on with another rant about liberal Hollywood.

For those who haven't seen it, The West Wing is a drama about the White House from writer-producer Aaron Sorkin, who also produces Sports Night for ABC. Martin Sheen stars as President Josiah Bartlet, a charming and brilliant New Hampshire Democrat.

Bartlet, as played by Sheen, is about as "Presidential" a President as Americans have seen since Kennedy. While witty, he can be arrogant and pigheaded. He's a good father and husband, but Ozzie Nelson he ain't. He is, as the right claims, a bimboless Bill Clinton.

Here's the deal: For all the yammering about how the show is a leftist's wet dream, it falls dismally short. Let's take the episode "A Proportional Response," where Bartlet has to make a decision about bombing Syria for the downing of an American military transport. The plane carried Bartlet's private physician, along with the doctor's wife and children. After being told of possible "proportional" responses (including the bombing of a Syrian intelligence agency) by the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Bartlet howls about the "disproportional" response: "Let the word go forth, from this time and this place, gentlemen, you kill an American, any American, we don't come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster." Geez, that sounds very Reaganesque to me.

In the end, Bartlet goes Clinton and destroys two ammo dumps and a building housing the aforementioned Syrian intelligence agency. Yes, very pragmatic, but how freaking lefty is it to bomb the Syrians, anyway? That's all we need: Another Hollywood production demonizing an Arab nation.

And while I'm at it, where are all the minorities in the Bartlet White House? In this particular episode, John Amos, who is black, plays the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Fitzwallace. The navy doctor was black. And the President's new nineteen-year-old aide is a black guy whose mother, a police officer, died...