I guess so.
The episode yesterday was interesting, but totally unrealistic. When Saul character said “I’m this close to calling the NY Times” it was the height of ridicilousness. The idea a mainstream outlet would publish something like that (especially as some sort of headline news) if the VP and the CIA do not went them to is hillarious (they waited several weeks before reporting on Abu Graib and only after having cleared it with the military it was coming and without publishing all the material in their posession — they were careful to limit the fallout to the government). But more importantly the idea that anyone would give a shit about 82 dead children in a drone strike and that this would be a liability for a VP is total science-fiction. America is way too far gone for something like this to make a splash, and it shows either naivette or more likely self-denial not to realize that. Also I very much doubt there are Saul-like bleeding heart characters in the CIA to begin with. (Also note how it is the VP who is responsible, not the president. Is this the old trick where bad things are not so much systemic as they are result of actions by bad men in the system who eventually get cleaned out?)
Also another thing, while there have been instances where Westerners hooked up with Islamists and decided to carry out attacks in their homelands (eg Christopher Caze and Lionel Dumont of the Roubaix gang), these were always people who became hard-core Islamists themselves (Brody only happens to be Muslim). They weren’t semi-sympathetic philosopher-terrorists avenging a specific crime, they were highly ideological and indoctrinated and visibly so. They broke contact with their old families and hung around other Salafis. They weren’t celebrated military personel, living in a suburb, running for political office. So not only is the homeland security establishment in Homeland a better, more moral version than what exists out there and set in a better, more gore-sensitive America, with less crony press, also in Homeland, unlike in RL, anyone is indeed a potential terrorist and it does make sense to keep surveillance even on what appear to be the least likely to start working with outside enemies.
Read this.
The idea that a multi-million dollar US TV show about US military and intelligence would be any more introspective than a recruiting ad is laughable.
Clayton -