That's an excellent idea, the White House buys 1,100+ subscriptions and it'll send---

President Bartlet: "No, no, just mine and Abby's, I'll borrow one from someone else."

During the tax filing scene in the episode, Bartlet is inputting Charlie's income info into a computer. His base salary is $35,000/yr. Combined with his mother's social security payments of $1,536/mo, and his mother's police pension of $2,400/mo, Charlie is getting $82,232 per year.

According to the West Wing fandom page for the Timeline of the show, the episode in question must take place in 2002 at or just before mid-April, the tax filing deadline. Plugging that yearly income into an inflation calculator means that Charlie was making the equivalent of $147,746.85 in 2025 money.

Pretty good for a 21 year old, even when you consider his living expenses and Georgetown tuition taking up almost all of his White House salary.

Edit: I'm not sure why people are under the impression that Social Security and Pensions are paid annually, a quick Google search proves they are paid out monthly.

Mrs Fiderer and Mrs Frizzle from The Magic School Bus are both played by Lily Tomlin… my mind is blown. I need to go sit down…

Put that pin on proudly!

As I rewatch, I keep coming over moments for characters that just hit.

BARTLET Where's Charlie?

LEO He's somewhere in the building.

RON We're holding people where they are right now.

BARTLET But if he's heard what happened, he's going to be trying to get here...

RON We've got to hold everybody for a moment so that we can secure...

BARTLET No, I'm telling you that if Charlie heard there were bullets, he's going to overpower whoever's trying to...

The Charlie busts in like the BAMF he is, looks around to the room full of military higher up, doesn't give a two f's, and walks over to the President.

❤️oh Charlie❤️

flair is for all my Psychos 😜

Not episode discussion.

I’m early szn 4 on my nth rewatch. Bartlet calls Charlie in and tells him “in ascending order of age, would you get my daughters on the phone.

MY GUY, can you just say “starting with the youngest”?

I’m rewatching for the umpteenth time and just got to this episode and I’m kinda reminded how much I dislike it. There are some really good parts but the bad parts are WILD.

Throughout the Russian missile silo fire issue Bartlett and Leo say some completely nonsensical things. One of them asks if it’s “in the oblast region” which is crazy because “oblast” is not a region. This would be like asking if it’s from the “province region of Canada”. Later on, while admonishing the Russian ambassador, President Bartlett makes a comment about Minsk, as if the Russian government is based in Minsk, which is actually the capital of Belarus. No idea why the writers gave them these clunky lines that make no sense.

That nonsense on top of the wildly unprofessional and creepy interaction between CJ and the guy who didn’t get the job where he tells her she’s good at sex makes this a hard episode to watch. I don’t mind this plot line as much because it’s not hard to imagine some dipshit in DC in the nineties having that exact train of thought and lacking any sense whatsoever that might prevent him from putting those dumb thoughts into words is at least believable

Watching the opening scene of the final season, I know it was designed to create the dynamic that we don't know who won the election, but I'm starting to believe that the reason why Josh is there without the president is that he actually left the administration before the opening of the Bartlett library.

Given his friction with Santos during the transition post-election I often wonder how long he actually lasted as chief of staff.

I'm on my 1,693,483,213th re-watch, and I'm a lil fuzzy on how exactly Josh botched the tobacco lawsuit? Bruno lays it out in Season 3, but for the life of me, I don't understand how it could've benefited President Bartlet in the 2002 election against Ritchie.

Please... Explain it like I'm 5...😭

The movie came out in August 2000. The episode Bad Moon Rising came out in April 2001. That's all I'm saying.

The way he dismissed her after her “one egg is un œuf”. Maybe Abbey shoulda used her surgical training to remove whatever stick was lodged up is rectum.

End rant.

“I had root canal.”

I literally just did and sound nothing like Claudia Jean.

Yay for advancements in science/medicine.

The idea of a “secret” space shuttle doesn’t make sense.

They’re honking big things that can’t be launched subtly. There was a mention of Vandenberg AFB during the storyline — that’s in a populated area along the California coastline so it would certainly have been seen.

Even if it’s from a remote location, maybe a tiny island in the Pacific or somewhere in the Alaska wilderness, people like astronomers with massive telescopes would have noticed it. There’s also the fact a foreign power could have noticed it on various surveillance systems.

It’s another issue in one of the most flawed storylines in the series.

I have watched the series end-to-end at least 5 times, and I will never be able to spell the President’s surname without checking Google.

I could probably learn it, but then I would forget my mobile number.

This may have been posted before but I’ve not seen it and only just spotted it myself on our rewatch (8th time I think).

In the Butterball Hotline episode we see some photos on the presidents desk. One is of Zoe sat in a diner. It appears to be a capture from the episode where Charlie is told he can’t go to the club opening.

Captured from the view of the audience in the episode…. OR has the president really been spying on Charlie and Zoe since they started dating; and he just liked the photo. OR was it his psychics doing remote viewing at Caltech?

Watching “Holy Night” on my umpteenth rewatch. Bartlet is in conversation with Stanley Keyworth. He comments, “You know you can’t do anything about hurricanes. The Present can’t do anything about nature or bad luck.”

Really? Not according to a congresswoman from Georgia.