ABC's Republican Character Under Siege from 'Conservative Purity Police' and 'Ultra-Conservative Yahoos'
Three weeks after the mother on ABC's Brothers
and Sisters ("Nora Walker" played by Sally Field) fretted
over the GOP "denying global warming," the ABC drama on Sunday night featured an
episode centered around her daughter, "Kitty Walker-McCallister," a Republican candidate
for Senate in California played by Calista Flockhart, coming under
attack from conservative rubes who think she used her influence to get
the visa renewed for her older sister's French boyfriend, "Luc."
At
a campaign event with mini-video camera-toting bloggers visible,
protesters boo and repeatedly chant: "America for Americans!" as they
hold up signs, such as "FRENCHIE GO HOME!!!" and, with a mustache added
to Kitty's face, "Hi Kitler!" Just like the real media's slander of Tea
Party protesters.
Kitty's husband whom she is running to succeed,
incumbent "Senator Robert McCallister," played by Rob Lowe,
charges: "It's just the conservative purity police trying to purge
the party of lily-livered Republican moderates." Kitty complains to
her sister, "Sarah Walker," played by Rachel Griffiths: "I am
fighting for my political life with a bunch of ultra-conservative
yahoos who want my head because you decided to fall in love with a
guy who has immigration issues."
Audio: 90-second MP3
clip that matches the video highlights from the March 14 episode.
As the plot proceeds, Kitty condemns the "character assassination"
and "guilt by association" while Sarah yells at a blogger with a video
camera: "It's people like you who give this country a bad name!" Kitty
also rues: "We can't control this crap that they put on the Internet."
But it all ends on a happy note with a Bob Schieffer-like
fairly tale of bi-partisanship, as Kitty, Sarah and brother "Kevin,"
played by Matthew Rhys, go to the airport to stop Luc from returning to
France and to confront the irresponsible bloggers. Kitty defends her
sister: "She is a professional businesswoman, taxpayer, soccer mom and
my sister. And this, this is Luc- Luc Laurent. And, yes, he is a French
citizen and an artist who takes no jobs from Americans. He loves Sarah
and Sarah loves him."
Kevin soon proclaims: "We can despise each
other's political opinions, but we don't despise each other." Kitty
agrees:
That's right. And that is the spirit that I want to take to Washington. You see, if I ever get to the point where my ideology is so rigid that I can't see another point of view or if my loyalty lies with my party instead of my country, well, then I want the voters to send me home.
Which earns applause from a
crowd that has gathered, including the blogger Sarah earlier denounced
as a "douche-bag."
In the early days of the program produced by
ABC Studios, Kitty was a DC-based conservative host of a TV debate show
who was frequently at odds with her liberal and vocally so mother, Nora.
As recounted in a November of 2006 CyberAlert post, "ABC's Conservative Character:
'Acknowledge the War Was a Mistake,'" it "took ABC until just the
ninth episode...to have its sole conservative character 'grow' -
as they say of conservatives who move to the left - from a pro-war
right-winger to a critic of the Iraq war who declared it 'a mistake.'"
- Brent
Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media
Research Center. Click here
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