We thought you could hardly find an audience that was more appreciative of the threat posed by people who are trying to kill us than the devotees of ‘24.’ Minor spoilers in the above link.

Scare ads targeting Republican senators advocating stronger civil liberties protections in the Patriot Act have begun airing during episodes of 24. The first ad, featuring a widower of the September 11th attacks asking “what if they’re wrong?” and ending with the tagline “our lives depend on it,” aired just after a pivotal moment in the last episode, when Jack Bauer threatened to cut someone’s eyes out in order to glean information from him.

Surprisingly, compared to previous seasons, season 5 of 24 has been relatively even-handed in both its political outlook and its use of torture as an intelligence tool. This season has certainly not been up to the caliber of season 2, when the use of torture was given a great deal of consideration and painted as a complicated issue with many downsides. But compared to last season, when torture was basically used as a pseudo deus-ex-machina device by the writers to give CTU information without doing any actual investigative work, it’s somewhat amazing that we’re five episodes in and this is the first time Jack’s tried to coerce information using the threat of pain.

Obviously, however, conservatives were paying close attention to the torture debate last season, and must have come to the same conclusion as those on the other side of the issue: 24’s gratuitous use of torture has made it acceptable in the eyes of its viewers, no longer a taboo method prone to failure but in fact a tidy and reliable method of intelligence gathering when time is critical. The fact that the red-herring “ticking bomb” scenario always comes up now when torture is discussed in the media is almost entirely thanks to 24; before the show’s existence, most people probably thought of a ticking bomb as the sort of thing Boris and Natasha might plan to foil Moose and Squirrel.