I have discovered an interesting subtext to this season’s 24, the addictive and insane Fox series in which superagent Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) saves the nation in a series of sleepless, danger-fraught days: It’s all about the presidency.

Not just the fictional presidency of Charles Logan, a chinless wonder with a soul more duplicitous than Nixon’s, but the current president and the man who would have been king. Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is probably as dismayed as every other Republican in the country over the dismal performance of GWB and in Logan the show gives us a president who is even worse: he has already killed the former president, hospitalized the First Lady when she stumbled on the truth of his villainy and sold the nation to a consortium of businessmen who seem intent to run it like Enron. Now who’s the worst president of all time, huh?

Then there’s the casting of William Devane as the Secretary of Defense Heller. Devane, with his lock jaw and patrician accent, is a suitable stand-in for a Kennedy — the actor once played JFK in a TV movie (The Missles of October) — a family that Murdoch loathes. Devane’s Heller is a decent guy, though, and in one of the show’s typically dramatic twists he drove his car off a cliff and into a lake to prevent bad guys from killing him to prevent him from going public with… O, I forget. Anyway he did it to save the country! And, until last week when we learned that he had somehow miraculously survived the accident, it seemed like the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Unlike, say, Chappaquiddick.

So in elevating a Kennedy manque and giving us a president worse than Bush, the Murdoch owned Fox has spun an alternate-universe presidency more satisfying (and less boring) than that of ABC’s Commander-in-Chief. That show would be better if they let David Lynch direct a few episodes, IMHO. I hear he’s a Republican, too.

Meanwhile, can anyone tell me what Jack Bauer is taking to stay up on days like that?