Occupy Wall Street earned a shout-out Sunday night on a CBS drama, the
kind of Hollywood affirmation the Tea Party could never dream of
receiving. “Before we begin,” a judge announced in a Chicago courtroom
on The Good Wife, “I want to take a few minutes to talk about
something that is happening a mere one hundred yards from this
courthouse: Occupy Wall Street!”
“Judge Charles Abernathy,” played by Denis O’Hare [1], continued to pay tribute to the leftist cause celebre: “Yes, these
amazing young men and women are braving 36-degree weather, with the
grit in their eyes of a shared cause, and all to challenge the system.
And I, for one, I salute them.”
Audio: MP3 clip [2]
The outburst came in a scene, but unconnected to it, of the judge
overseeing a lawsuit against a software company which sold data-mining
software to Syria which used it to identify and “disappear” American
protesters.
Later in the February 19 episode, “Live from Damascus,” the judge
loudly sniffles, leading him to explain: “Over lunch I went to offer
moral support to Occupy Wall Street and it’s because of the pepper
spray.”
Have the Chicago police ever pepper-sprayed the Occupy protesters?
Almost exactly a year ago (February 22, 2011), the show gave prime time legitimacy [3] to the presumption the Tea Party is racist as a lawyer in a courtroom tried to discredit an expert witness (Gary Cole as Sarah Palin supporter “Kurt McVeigh”) who testified against a since-exonerated black defendant, by demanding he admit he’s “a member of the Tea Party.” The lawyer asserts “it is our contention that my client’s prosecution was racist,” citing McVeigh’s “membership in a racist organization,” namely the Tea Party. Video: