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Allison Janney in The West Wing (1999)

Goofs

The State Dinner

The West Wing

Edit

Factual errors

The interpreter says there is no such language as Indonesian. The official language of Indonesia - which any president and any state interpreter would have to be fluent in - is Indonesian, also known as Bahasa Indonesia.
Laurie, Sam's friend who is a call girl, is brought to the White House State Dinner by a major contributor. While the fact that he is a major contributor would help, the Secret Service would have run background checks on anyone who was invited to the White House and would potentially meet the President. Laurie was introduced as "Brittany" by the contributor, but would not have been admitted into the White House under a pseudonym. Additionally, Laurie says that she is told by the contributor what to wear but does not know where she's going until the "date". However, with the background check, Laurie would have had to provide certain information (likely birth date and social security number) in advance, something that her client would likely *not* have available for her.
The dialogue implies that the senior staff of the White House have undertaken to issue orders to Naval vessels to enable them to evade a hurricane. In real life the executive branch does not do so, and it would be absurd for it to try to do so. Such orders in the US Navy originate with the CNO, the fleet commanders, the type commanders, the squadron commanders, and the tactical commanders. The Navy does not wait for storm-evasion instructions from the White House. The expertise for such matters resides with the Navy, not the White House.
The interpreter says he cannot interpret because he speaks Javanese and the president speaks only Batak. Batak is an ethnicity, not a language. There are seven Batak languages.
When being briefed on the carrier group caught in the path of the hurricane, the officer conducting the briefing describes the carrier group containing two battleships. The last battleship, the USS Missouri, was decommissioned March 31, 1992.

Anachronisms

President Bartlet is told that the battle group threatened by the hurricane is made up of, "The aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, which carries 5,000 men. Two guided missile cruisers, two destroyers, and two battleships ..." The last U.S. battleship in service, the U.S.S. Missouri, was decommissioned in 1992. At the time of filming (1999) there were no battleships in active service.

Character error

The interpreter claims that there are 583 languages spoken in Indonesia. There are actually over 700 languages spoken in Indonesia.
Josh refers to the hurricane as a "class four". Hurricanes are given a category, not a class.

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