We haven’t paid much attention to Aaron Sorkin’s faux-news drama “The Newsroom” this summer, mostly because there’s too much actual news going on in South Carolina and elsewhere in the country. But on the show’s season finale this week, the real-world setting included a now-infamous quote by former Lt. Gov. André Bauer.
The Newsroom stars Jeff Daniels as a cable news anchor who starts injecting some of his own opinions into the broadcast; hilarity presumably ensues. In the season finale, Daniels’ character says he’s what the tea party would refer to as a “Republican in Name Only,” but then tells why tea partiers are the real “R.I.N.O.S.”
He then calls out several notable Republicans including U.S. Rep. Allen West (R-Florida), anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, former side-show act presidential candidate Herman Cain, using radical quotes from each of the tea party leaders to skewer their ultra-conservative viewpoints.
Daniels’ character then reads the infamous “stray animals” quote from former Lt. Gov. André Bauer’s failed 2010 gubernatorial campaign:
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”
Daniels’ character used the quote to illustrate what he called a tea party belief that “If you’re poor, it means you’re either too lazy or too stupid to be rich.” Although we’re not exactly sure why the show called Bauer a “tea party leader,” considering he couldn’t even tea party his way into a Republican congressional nomination this summer…
Watch a video of the segment below:
That clip is almost enough to make me start watching television again.