What is the virtue of a proportional response?

You're listening to The West Wing Weekly. I'm Rishi Keishirui.

And I'm Josh Wimbledina.

Today we're discussing episode three of season one of The West Wing, a proportional response.

Later on we'll be joined by Dule Hill, who makes his first appearance as Charlie in this episode.

Very exciting. Our first guest.

But first, Josh, what did you think?

I'm not going to be coy Rishi.

I loved it. I think it's a pretty great rich, layered, firing and all cylinders episode.

As much as I loved one and two, something blossomed in this one where it's sort of rich and everything's coming together and very enjoyable and thoughtful way.

I totally agree. This is really, I think, our first taste of 10 out of 10 fantastic episode.

And an indication of what this show can and is going to be.

So the episode is called a proportional response.

And on the surface, the title is about the military action against Syria for taking down the plane that Morse Tollivrus on as we learned in the last episode.

But I think there's actually a great metaphor. It's a great phrase for a lot of things that are happening in this episode.

There are these sort of analogous dichotomies that are set up throughout the episode.

And one of them is military, the proportional versus the disproportional response.

And the other is maybe governing the act of governing versus the game of politics.

And uniting these is your righteous feelings and what you really want to do, what you think is the right thing to do versus the way things look and having to sort of balance those two.

Correct. The president wants to, this is his first real military action and he wants to bring the,

you know, American fury down. Part of me, Mr. President, just what else is the,

the disproportional response, let the word ring forth from this time in this place, gentlemen, you kill an American, any American, we don't come back with a proportional response.

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