It seems no genre of television is safe from gratuitous shots at how the Iraq war makes the U.S. an “imperialistic bully.” On Sunday's episode of Cold Case, a drama about a supposed squad of Philadelphia Police Department detectives who solve old murders, a witness is questioned about a 1981 murder of a husband and wife who were anti-Vietnam war hippies. When the woman who attended a college reunion party shortly before the murders recalls how “I was still kind of stuck in my old hippy ways. Didn't fit very well into the decade of greed,” “Detective Scotty Valens” points out how they all attended college “at the height of the Vietnam war.” That leads the woman, who by the end of the show is arrested as the murderer, to recall how the victims “were protesting against an America that had become an imperialistic bully.” To which “Detective Lilly Rush,” the star of the program played by Kathryn Morris, chimes in with an obvious allusion to Iraq: “Sounds vaguely familiar.” (Screen shot is of “Lilly Rush" talking to the witness/criminal.)
