Law & Order: Pitiful Intent?
Has The Hammer become a Man of Tender Sensibilities?
You’ve probably heard this already. But Tom DeLay fired off a letter to NBC this week complaining about an episode of Law & Order CI in which passing reference is made to his threats against members of the judiciary.
Specifically, in an episode about a white supremacist who kills a judge’s family, as the detectives hunt for the killer, one of them quips, “Maybe we should put out an APB for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-Shirt.”
DeLay’s letter claimed that this “slur” was aimed at his statements about “the need for Congress to closely monitor the federal judiciary.”
DeLay’s interpretation notwithstanding, we thought it might have had more to do with the time he told supporters right after Terry Schiavo’s death that: “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.”
DeLay even claims his First Amendment rights are being traduced: “To equate legitimate constitutional inquiry into the role of our courts with a threat of violence against our judges is to equate the First Amendment with terrorism.”
Actually, DeLay’s analysis gets even better when he lassos in Brit Hume as the impartial witness to establish his non-judge-whacking bona fides.
“When a responsible journalist like Brit Hume made an inquiry into such comments,” DeLay continued, “he quickly understood them to be limited to Congress’s oversight responsibilities and nothing more.”
Tom DeLay, tender flower.
Late Update: TPM Reader EB tells me that the perp in the episode wasn’t a white supremacist but rather someone disgruntled at their treatment by a judge. I was going from press descriptions of the episode. But perhaps they got it wrong. And as long as we’re on the subject, aren’t there some right-wing press hooligans we have on hand who go nuts when the MSM makes such an outlandish mistake?
