I think Roslin & Adama are going end up dissolving the Quorom. Zarek isn’t going to allowed to succeed Roslin.
I think he was able to see Roslin’s point of view after witnessing the Baltar worship in person. The look on his face reflected the disgust that Roslin was feeling. He seemed to understand then what Roslin was trying to prevent, which he did not understand before. So while he was right that the implementation of Roslin’s law would be oppressive, what he failed to realize is that the theory behind it was sound. His opposition to her seems knee-jerk to me because he fails to see the big picture. If he had said in that meeting, “How are we going to enforce this law in a way that doesn’t come off as tyrannical and oppressive?” then it wouldn’t have seemed so adolescent to me.
Possibly worse, from a civil-liberties perspective. Remember, Zarek was President, briefly, following the exodus from New Caprica - it only lasted a week or two before he stepped down in favor of “Vice-President Roslin”, but he used that time to establish vigilante squads with a mandate to “disappear” collaborators with the Cylon-dominated New Caprica government. I think Tom Zarek’s alarm at Roslin’s authoritarian streak is sincere - but he’s got a nasty one himself.
Even if Lee understood why Roslyn made her executive order, and agrees with her that something needs to be done about Baltar… he’ll never be able to go along with her methods. That’s just who he is. He always does the right thing* no matter how disasterous the consequences.
And everybody knows this: his father, Laura, Tom Zarek. All of 'em.
It’s not that he fails to see the big picture, it’s that he just doesn’t think the big picture is as important as the bigger picture of his own moral compass.
- except, maybe, in his frakked-up personal life.
Well said. That lawyer guy last season observed he was just fucking with daddy. Hell, who hasn’t observed that? First or second ep this season Lee told Zarek something to the effect that “sometimes you need a benevolent dictator” but then he wiffle waffles and decides to take the moral high road. It seems like Lee runs around looking for, and pissing off mommy and daddy figures. When he told Baltar “I don’t do these things for you” I almost choked. What do you do these things for kid?
I can agree with this.
He and Roslin see different pictures. I’m not sure his picture is bigger. Morality doesn’t matter if there’s no human race to be moral. I think that’s what Roslin thinks, anyway. It remains to be seen which of them will turn out to be right.
He’s another example of what the Chief was saying about people winding up with their second choices. It’s interesting that his moral compass doesn’t extend to infidelity or patronizing prostitutes. Maybe that’s why, when he gets on his high horse, it makes me cringe.
Is there any reason to believe that prostitution in the Colonies was illegal?
-Joe
And yet some of the most inspirational and influential historical leaders had incredibly similar flaws. Despite their frakked up personal lives, they set examples in public that we still admire today.
It’s not illegal, based on the ep Black Market, but it wasn’t looked on as kosher either. Even Tom Zarek is a bit scandalized that Lee was there, on Cloud 9 with a prostitute. The people Shevan worked for also sold children into slavery, so while it may not be illegal, it certainly wasn’t aboveboard.
And yes, even the great leaders who we still admire today should be looked at askance for their moral inconsistencies. It means they don’t have an unerring moral compass. But then, no one on the show does. The Lee/Roslin conflict is definitely necessary to the plot. I guess I’ve just always found Lee to be a bit of a self-righteous twerp.
sigh Alas, poor forgotten sociolators. 
From my perspective, it means that there are at least two levels of morality. One is the morality you owe to the public. The other is your personal morality. So long as a leader is moral in a public sense, that is, with regard to his or her exercise of power, so far as I am concerned they can indulge their sexual desires with anyone who’s willing. Apollo’s morality with regard to his personal sexual behaviour has absolutely no bearing, in my view, on his moral stances with regard to the exercise of power over the public.
No more than Roslin, in my view.
Oh, and remember, Roslin herself had been having a long-term affair with a married man. Sexual fidelity and patronage of prostitutes really doesn’t affect the analysis of whether either Roslyn or Apollo or either of them is correct about governance policy.
Put it this way …
It is suspected that part of the reason that the Pegasus went the way it did was because it didn’t have a fleet of civilians to balance its leadership’s considerations. In other words, without Roslin, Adama might have become more like Cain.
Similarly, within civilian government, there must be a balance. Because no matter how much of a “hero” or “visionary” an individual leader might be, he or she will be wrong sometimes. Without an effective Zarek or Apollo in play, Roslin is too free to make mistakes. And without an effective Zarek or Apollo in play, there’s more room for a Baltar to step in and take over.
Human governance is never about blindly following an anointed leader, even in such dire circumstances. Because any such leader is inevitably going to go wrong at some point. Look at Tigh, the military dictator who ended up killing people over coffee.
She would definitely get her way more often. I think comparing her to Helena Cain is an exaggeration; can’t imagine Roslin authorizing gang rape as torture, for instance. It really depends on what the big picture is, if Roslin’s means justify her ends. We won’t know that until the end of the show, if we know it at all. I am one of the people who wanted her to successfully steal the election from Baltar, though. And as much as I love the character of Baltar, if there were real justice in the BSG world, he would have been executed for treason.
Yeah, this is all fine. Doesn’t make Zarek or Lee a more likeable character to me (I like Zarek better because we’re not supposed to like him). That’s why I said Lee came off as petulant and childish. Roslin comes off like a mean mommy-- she was a school teacher after all, and sometimes acts like she’s still in the classroom. I echo levdrakon’s sentiments about why Lee seems adolescent to me. He’s supposed to be providing moral balance and principled opposition, but it can appear that he’s just being contrary because Roslin was snippy to him in a meeting, as per last week.
/civics lecture.
Oh, Tigh is no Laura Roslin. I think we can agree on that. It would also be cool if you could not mischaracterize my opinion as wanting the characters on the show to “blindly follow an anointed leader.” There are far too many people who would fancy themselves the anointed leader for that ever to work out. I think what it comes down to for me is that I find Roslin more sympathetic than the others, even when she goes about things the wrong way (why couldn’t she find a way to accommodate Starbuck, as Adama did, for instance?). I understand her motives and I think they’re good, though the implementation has been problematic at times. With Lee, half the time I don’t think he knows why the hell he’s doing what he’s doing; he’s being contrarian for it’s own sake, not because he knows what’s right better than anyone else. That’s why things never turn out the way he wants them to or thinks they will, and why his personal life is a disaster.
OK, that’s fine, we can agree to disagree, then, because there are a lot of epithets I could use to describe Roslin, but “twerp” is not one of them. Self-righteous, sure, everyone on the show is.
Don’t forget that the pimp who was in charge of Lee’s prostitute was also buying and selling children for sexual slavery. Lee gave that man money and patronized his business. That steps beyond the bounds of his personal sexual practices and into the realm of public policy. And the discussion is about moral compasses, not about governance policy. I don’t think either Roslin or Lee have a lock on an ideal governance policy, do you?
If Lee was on Earth he would be a member of the ACLU. He sees the big picture so clearly he fears that any deviation only will open doors that will lead to destruction of the government. In this case, he may be right. Roslyn wants to have a special judicial committee at her disposal so she can be judge, jury, and executioner. By the standards expressed in the show that’s wrong, even if her intents are noble. She wants to limit religious assembly for Baltar. Supposedly it won’t affect anybody else but they point out in the show that if she limits assembly then it will affect other religious groups as well. Roslyn reassures everybody that this law is only meant for Baltar but that’s the problem; it’s wrong for a government to single out specific individuals for special treatment. Lee is right, even if Baltar disgusts him, he has every right to be treated by the same standards as everybody else in the fleet. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and Roslyn is showing signs of corruption via her actions. Her reasons sound reasonable and just, she has too much to do and not enough time to do it in so she is taking shortcuts. But Lee is right, the shortcuts she is taking will have long term ramifications and from his perspective, she is just a person who doesn’t deserve special powers.
Maybe you guys are right and I’m letting my overall dislike of the character of Lee get in the way of my understanding of the situation. It seemed to me like, last week, he was all set to defend her in the Quorum meeting, but then she was snippy with him and he decided he was going to take her down out of sheer contrariness. Am I remembering this wrong?
I think that Roslin is going to find a way to get to Baltar this season before she dies. I sympathize with her incredible frustration that this person can get away with horrendous acts of treason that she can’t prove or punish him for… AND NOW people are worshiping him and making a messiah out of him. Makes for a good story, but I can see Roslin’s POV here. You are right that making generalized laws just to strike out at a particular person doesn’t really work that well. It sure didn’t in the last ep.
Did anyone miss Callie’s bitching this week? I swear to Christ, I’m no longer afraid to watch this show. I’m not sure what this means about me but during that montage of Chief’s where he punched Callie made me smile, just a little. 
Remember that Lee had just annoyed Roslyn by defending Baltar. His defense of her in the Quorum was, in a way, his extending an olive branch to her: “let’s be friends, like we used to be” as it were.
Roslyn slapped him down. She didn’t want to be friends.
And, in doing so, she basically confirmed what Zarek had implied to Lee about her. Remember that Lee has thought highly of both Roslyn and Zarek – but he’s as pigheaded as his father, and has disagreed with all of 'em even so.
You seem to be allowing your mislike of Lee, and like of Laura, to color how you’re viewing their actions. They’re all deeply, deeply flawed characters. (Thank goodness.)
I suspect you misread something. I’m saying that the civilian fleet that probably helped prevent the Galactica from becoming Pegasus.
Which is true. We’ve already seen one major example of how, if Roslin had gotten her way in “making the hard decisions for the good of humanity”, they’d all be dead, when she wanted to pitch Helo’s Sharon out of the airlock.