Criminal Intent?

This is a couple of days old, but it's pretty funny, so here it is for your jeering pleasure. Tom DeLay (Isn't he House Majority Leader or something? Doesn't he have better things to do?) was a bit annoyed that they mentioned his name on the season finale of Law & Order: Criminal Intent on Wednesday night. I didn't see the show, but the detectives were looking for the killer of a judge and, frustrated when they couldn't find any clues, Detective Eames (played by Kathryn Erbe) suggested looking for people wearing Tom DeLay T-shirts.

It was obviously not a line intended to puff up the Republican leader, but perhaps it was a misstep for DeLay to personally complain to NBC, accusing the network and the show with "a reckless disregard for the suffering initiated by recent tragedies and a great disservice to public discourse." He owned up to his own intemperate comments, but (in my favorite line from his letter) "when a responsible journalist like Brit Hume made an inquiry into such comments, he quickly understood them to be limited to Congress's oversight responsibilities and nothing more." Brit Hume said it was OK, so--case closed.

Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, issued a reply claiming that no political content was intended by the line, but executive producer Dick Wolf, creative force behind the entire Law & Order franchise, got off the best line: "I do congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a TV show." You can read about the whole thing at MSNBC, and The Stakeholder, the blog of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Caucus, has the complete statements of DeLay, NBC, and Wolf.