I missed Commander In Chief last night. I’ve missed it every night. (But I never miss it much.) I watched the three-minute recap on ABC’s website today.

In this episode (number 9), our bathrobe-clad president Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis) agonizes over the decision to commute the sentence of a death row inmate, a murderess named Linda Bodum. The convict’s lawyer is an old boyfriend of the president, who comes to the White House to beg for clemency. If Geena doesn’t commute the death sentence, she “might as well stick the needle in her arm yourself,” he whines.

By the end of the show, Madam President decides to spare the wretched woman’s life, because she “deserves as much compassion” as the turkey she pardoned for Thanksgiving. How nice.

Matthew Franck points out a hole in the plot:

The only trouble is, the murderer is languishing on Texas’s death row — perpetrator of a crime under state law, convicted under state law, awaiting execution by state authorities. No one told the writers or producers of this stupid show that a president has no power to pardon, or to commute the sentence of, such a prisoner…

It is kind of amazing that nobody involved in the production of that show — the writers, the director, the cast, the producers — nobody ever said, “um, the president can’t really do that, dude.”

Their notion that the president can fix every little problem in the world goes a long way toward explaining how liberals can blame George Bush for everything. They think he really spends his time evilly not fixing stuff. Wars, hurricanes, AIDS, poverty — he could end them all with a phone call! That bastard!