Sorry about the recent lack of any kind of posting, but between an unexpectedly active Labor Day weekend and a ton and a half of work that couldn’t wait, I’ve barely had time to even check my email.

So I decided to break for a bit, and watched some “24″ episodes on DVD. I never really got into the show on TV, because a) nearly 1/3 of the hour is comprised by disruptive 4 1/2 minute commercial breaks and b) even with the “previously on ‘24′” prologues, waiting an entire week to get from one hour of a story to the next doesn’t really do much for me in the way of entertainment, but watching the show season by season sans commercials makes it quite enjoyable.

Jack Bauer has replaced Vic Mackey as my favorite TV hero — I’m not much of a TV watcher, so when I take an interest in a TV product it generally means that I’m either greatly amused by it or it is of an informative nature, like something on C-Span, Fox or whatever.

Anyway, I didn’t come here this morning to talk about me — yes, it is morning, there’s something going on with the blog’s clock, but as I am typing this it is actually 3:00 am on Thursday here in North Carolina — I came here to bring up something that occurred to me as I watched “24″.

Here is one of Hollywood’s most profound recent year ratings triumphs, a show about the L.A. (where Hollywood is) office of an agency known as CTU, or Counter Terrorist Unit. It has done five successful seasons, with each episode a “real time” hour of each story — it is definitely a unique and well crafted, well scripted, fast paced (hell, non-stop action!) series. The characters have well defined personalities, many of them realistically flawed. Each season takes place in a single 24 hour period, hence the title and the 24 episode seasons.

CTU is my kind of agency. They do what they need to do to prevent nuclear detonations, assassinations and biological warfare attacks by terrorists on U.S. soil — conveniently for filming purposes, all in Los Angeles. They place suspects under an all-invasive, no-privacy-allowed high tech microscope with satellites, computers, phone taps and everything else at their considerable disposal, they torture interrogate stubborn prisoners in holding rooms right on their premises, hold suspects without access to an attorney, the bottom line being the saving of innocent American lives from terrorism, hold the PC.

Jack Bauer, the main character, is a guy with whom Job would have gladly traded places. He and Murphy’s Law are joined at the hip. His wife and daughter are kidnapped, his wife is murdered by a lady mole who was Jack’s partner and onetime lover, Jack is brutally tortured with resulting heart problems, receives a few beatings that would put most strong men away for good, becomes a junkie in order to maintain his cover on an assignment in Colombia and then leads an involved and typically dangerous operation while trying to kick the habit, is fired, arrested and has pretty much everything undesirable that can happen to someone happen to him, all because of his job, yet he remains dedicated unto death to his country; A few times, he goes into situations with the full expectation of sacrificing himself to save the country, and does so because he sees his actions as the only solutions to the problems at hand. He’s even sliced himself open without so much as hesitating or flinching because he needed to appear wounded. And he stays in constant action 24 hours at a clip without so much as a couple of minutes’ rest.

When he needs information fast, he has no compunction about ruthlessly torturing it out of a bad guy right on the spot.

To put it in more technical psychological terminology, he is one bad dude.

All that having been said, the series has been a great commercial success — very few, even those who have never watched “24″, have not heard the name Jack Bauer.

So here we have a fictitious government agency that Hollywood has made heroes out of, and made mega-millions in profits on, that is the antithesis of all that those left wing, anti-war, treasonous scumbag marxist liberal ladies and gentlemen out there stand for.

Practically everything CTU and Jack Bauer do to protect the country has at some point in the last couple of years been something the Hollywood left has helped raise hell about as a way to villify the Bush Administration. Domestic spying, deprivation of Constitutional rights, torture…. yet it’s perfectly alright to make heroes of those fictional characters using these same methods, as long as the greedy hypocrites can squeeze lots of revenue out of 18 + minutes of commercials, leaving the viewer 42 minutes of actual program time in the hour. It’s easy to keep track, as each commercial break begins and ends with a timeline to keep the continuity of the hour represented by each episode, and the timelines, thankfully without commercials in between them, appear on the DVDs, as well.

Then there are the anti-American, leftist asswipes liberal actors like George Clooney who have no problem slandering the President and screeching anti-war rhetoric in real life while raking in the bucks playing heroic military roles like his character in a movie he made with Nicole Kidman where Serbs were planning on detonating a stolen Russian nuke near the U.N. (if it weren’t for the potential collateral damage, I’d have very little problem there) — I cannot for the life of me remember the title of the film.

I suppose that the distaste I see in traitors profiting grandly from make-believe stories of patriotism they don’t know anything about is not shared by the Hollywood crowd. After all, these are people whose multi-million dollar incomes make it possible to isolate themselves from the very realities they profess to know something about while seeing themselves as qualified to opine on, but… but that’s Hollywood and that’s liberals, and wherever you find liberals, you find hypocrisy.