Plot
When former President Owen Lassiter dies, two other ex-Presidents (former President D. Wire Newman and former Acting President Glen Allen Walken) fly on Air Force One with President Josiah Bartlet to attend the funeral. Onboard, Bartlet's two historic guests partake in a lively debate about their administrations. Lassiter's and Newman's past mistakes haunt the current administration when massive pro-democracy protests are held across Saudi Arabia and the protesters surround a compound containing 50 Americans, leaving Bartlet to decide whether to support the Saudi regime or to risk the fragile status quo by supporting the protesters' efforts. Meanwhile, C.J. Cregg investigates claims that DARPA is conducting experiments on mind control. Leo discovers his ex-wife is engaged to be married. And Josh referees a debate between representatives of Connecticut and North Carolina, concerning an original copy of the Bill of Rights allegedly stolen by Connecticut at the end of the Civil War.
Much of the episode centers on this quote of Abraham Lincoln, from which the title is taken: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present."
Read more about this topic: The Stormy Present
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)