LA Times Journalist Apparently Flunked Math and Civics

Wahington served one term; who knew?

Mary McNamara, LA Times television critic and presumably a college graduate who is not one of the bitter people that cling to guns and bibles, brings us this review of the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries "John Adams". Her review is somewhat underwhelming to say the least, and sounds more like a pep-rally for competing networks Showtime and TNT, to say nothing of how she probably comes off in person at the right cocktail parties.

Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion and if Ms McNamara doesn't like HBO, well that is her right. But as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, while people are entitled to their own opinions, they are not entitled to their own facts. And Ms. McNamara seems to think that George Washington served only one term.

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. "I know now what it is like to be disliked," he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

One can only be astounded that this sort of error made it through layers of editors and fact checkers and ended up on press despite the fact that any 5th grader with an internet connection would have been able to look it up. But perhaps more amazing is that apparently Ms. McNamara managed to spend four years at an expensive university without taking so much as a basic American history course in which she might have learned what people my age knew in elementary school. Were I to offer Ms. McNamara an opinion, it would be to immediately write to her alma mater to ask for a full refund of her tuition so that she can pay for a more modest educational goal that might lead to a career better suited to her level of ability.

She might even get to spend some time with the rest of us bitter people in the Midwest who didn't go to an elite school.