Really?

Now we know what happens in all the time the president isn’t at fundraising events in Hollywood or playing golf or basketball. He’s watching teevee. A lot of teevee.

An NRO youngster named Matthew Continetti has written about a New York Times weekend culture essay proposing to explain the president’s lofty tastes in television viewing as if we might all be illuminated by it. Matthew is not impressed.

Obama, we learn, “seeks not to escape to the delicious back-stabbing of the ‘Real Housewives,’” nor to “the frivolity of the singing teens on ‘Glee,’” but to “shows like HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Boardwalk Empire,’” as well as to “the DVD box set of AMC’s ‘Breaking Bad,’” Mad Men, Homeland, The Wire, Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, and SportsCenter. “Friends say Obama is also awaiting the new season of the Netflix show ‘House of Cards.’”…

The problems with Shear’s exercise in psychoanalysis quickly become apparent. He makes distinctions where none ought to exist. The antics on Modern Family and Parks and Recreation are just as frivolous as “the singing teens on ‘Glee.’” Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and House of Cards are filled with as much “delicious back-stabbing” as any episode of Real Housewives. The dramas the president favors are soap operas with sophisticated vocabularies. Left unmentioned is the difference between the shows Shears pooh-poohs and the shows Obama watches. It is the same difference between a juicer bought at Walmart and one bought at Williams-Sonoma: The latter is a luxury good. It takes cash to afford the cable connections, premium channels, and Netflix subscriptions required to watch all of the titles on the president’s viewing list. It is also necessary to have leisure time, which, disturbingly, the president seems to have a lot of. No wonder he finds out about everything from the newspapers.

Shear clearly had a thesis in mind when he sat down to write. His article is an argument in search of evidence. He seems to think Obama’s taste in television reveals a tragic sense of life, a Niebuhrian realism that informs the administration’s domestic and international agenda. Shows that undermine this idea, such as sports and comedies, are downplayed. Dramas with antiheroes, violence, conspiracies, and sex are emphasized.

“It may be ‘Homeland’ that offers the most interesting insight into Obama’s downtime preferences,” Shear says. Homeland is a Showtime series about an insane CIA agent pursuing an Islamic sleeper cell. The show is just as violent and ridiculous as 24, but lacks the “let’s roll” ethos that imbued the background of the earlier series. For Shear, however, this increasingly absurd program stands for much more. “‘Homeland,’” he writes in a wonderful example of cliché, “reveals the hidden dangers in a complicated world.” It is also “subtle, presenting choices that are rarely easy and never cost-free.” Complicated, subtle, rarely easy, never cost-free — do these adjectives call to mind the reputation of a certain head of state? “It is not unlike the phrase Obama often uses with his advisers: ‘Hard things are hard.’” And dumb things are dumb…

About the president’s habits and tastes there can be no question: They are utterly typical of the American educated class.

Homeland, Game of Thrones, House of Cards — these are the latest distractions of the well-schooled echelon of society that toils in high positions in finance, academia, media, and the bureaucracy, that binge-watches fashionable shows with determination and marathon-runner stamina, that discusses over dinner recent articles in the New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker, that laments rising inequality during vacations in tropical locales. To watch such programs is not a sign of critical acumen but of social status…

Actually, it’s a sign of much more than that if you happen to be president of the United States. Take a moment. Think of what you would regard as entertaining diversion if you were the president (I won’t say leader of the free world, because he is clearly no longer that.) Wouldn’t you want anything BUT the shows he professes to watch?

After all, he’s not just a member in good standing of the educated class that takes all its cues from the New York Times and WAPO crowd. He’s a guy who is confronted daily by the power politics of the most ruthless dictators and terrorists in the world, statistics of drive-by shootings, the machinations of drug cartels, the cynical deal making of lobbyists from Wall Street and Madison Avenue, the demolition derby that is the legislative process, the ruthless behaviors of cabinet officers, agency heads, lawyers, lawyers, and lawyers in the executive branch, and the constant disinformation promulgated by the double and triple agendas of the intelligence community.

So how do you take a break from it all in the few hours a week (say 30, given we’re speaking of Obama) when you just want to be entertained? The unceasing political treachery conducted by knives, swords, and poison in Game of Thrones? The constant, pervasive evil of the characters in Breaking Bad? The cynical narcissism without end of Mad Men? The naked self-eating malice of House of Cards, which repels even members of congress as a grotesque parody of their lives? The malevolent violence of Boardwalk Empire — rides into the reeds that end in gunshots muffled by the surf. Is this fun for a person who has real power? How?

Not fun. It could only be, well, absorbing if you need to keep reaffirming some life narrative that justifies your own daggers, swords, and poisons.

Otherwise, you’d probably be seeking different subjects altogether. A series about a rural veterinarian, filled with love and laughs. A movie about a girl who learns how to win a spelling bee by tapping the rhythm of words on her leg. A movie about a girl who leads geese on their migration. A whole bunch of sports movies that bring tears to the eyes while demonstrating that hard work and good character on all sides can win the day. Or a movie about a kid born poor who rose to the heights of one of the most accomplished professions in the world, one that involved saving lives rather than ruling them. You know, a kid who wasn’t born with a white professor mother who wanted him to transform the world with daggers, swords, and poisons.

But maybe you need to keep yourself amped up to white hot anger with The Wire and surfeited with contempt via Parks and Recreation for the inept unaccountable bureaucracy you perpetuate so relentlessly. Your excuse for ruling by edict on the rare occasions when you pay any attention whatever to what your beloved government is doing.

Or maybe you don’t make any connection at all. You’re tired from schmoozing with movie stars and 18 holes of golf, and the best thing that goes with your late night choom is Breaking Bad. Maybe you know all about that.

Which would be a good sign. Because we sure do. Understand about the late night slouch with his choom. We get it.

Makes sense now.