WHEN FICTITIOUS PRESIDENTS MEET: Lame-duck Biden urges Trump to ‘get a job’ while spending dwindling moments of his own with Martin Sheen.

Flashback: Magical Sorkinism:

Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.

As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news—except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.

It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week—not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.

Or as Megan McArdle reminded leftists at the Daily Beast a decade ago: Memo: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn’t Actually Work.