Beautiful.

I discovered this last night on Drudge and it pretty much made my day. I’ve always known that even with the liberal plot twists of 24, there must be a conservative behind the whole thing merely tossing a few bones to the dems. I was so right.

During three decades as a journeyman screenwriter, Surnow grew increasingly conservative. He “hated welfare,” which he saw as government handouts. Liberal courts also angered him. He loved Ronald Reagan’s “strength” and disdained Jimmy Carter’s “belief that people would be nice to us just because we were humane. That never works.” He said of Reagan, “I can hardly think of him without breaking into tears. I just felt Ronald Reagan was the father that this country needed. . . . He made me feel good that I was in his family.”

Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.” Last year, he contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.”

The article itself is a little wishy-washy and whines about the way torture is portrayed on 24 — what do you expect from the New Yorker? — but the actual story of Joel Surnow (co-creator and executive producer) is simply beautiful. He is friends with Rush Limbaugh. He calls Bill Clinton a yuppie. He donated to Rick Santorum’s campaign. He believes torture works. He wants to make a pro-McCarthy movie with his friend Ann Coulter… and the list goes on. Honestly, does it get any better than that?

It just makes me happy inside to know that one of the most popular shows on TV comes from what could be the most conservative man in Hollywood. The lefties must simply love that.

Surnow, for his part, revels in his minority status inside the left-leaning entertainment industry. “Conservatives are the new oppressed class,” he joked in his office. “Isn’t it bizarre that in Hollywood it’s easier to come out as gay than as conservative?” His success with “24,” he said, has protected him from the more righteous elements of the Hollywood establishment. “Right now, they have to be nice to me,” he said. “But if the show tanks I’m sure they’ll kill me.”

Besides the fact that he gets to work with Kiefer Sutherland, I definitely do not envy his job - having to put up with all the Hollywood shenanigans and being surrounded by silly liberals pretty much all the time.

…Okay, wait. What am I saying? I would put up with anything to work with Kiefer Sutherland.