So, the last place I expected to be exposed to a bitter anti-Tea Party campaign speech? In the middle of Friday's Smallville episode, sandwiched in between Clark-and-Lois-at-their-class-reunion rom-com antics and an A-plot about Brainiac 5 and Ghost-of-Christmas-style Legion time-travel shenanigans. All of a sudden, we get Green Arrow ranting about bloggers and supposed anti-immigrant bigotry. Apparently, the Tea Party is Apocalyps psychic astroturf. Maybe next week we'll find out that Darkseid is funding anonymous anti-Blur campaign ads courtesy of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision?

Admittedly, they've been larding the show with politically correct greenwash horsehockey for years now, but at least they balanced it out with Knight Templar eco-fanatic villains like Tess Mercer.

The thing is, I'm actually paying folding-cash money for the privilege of hearing some pretty-boy play-fascist call my friends and relatives bigots. That's not cool, and I'm seriously thinking of cancelling my season pass because of this. The only thing keeping me on the edge here is that the character in question, Oliver Queen, has always been a pinko "liberal" - in the Frank Miller version, he was a flat-out New Left bomb-throwing communist. I *may* be overreacting to an unreliable-narrative speech which wasn't supposed to be a Writer On Board soapbox affair. But it sure was *staged* like an Ayn Rand monologue, and in combination with the forget-the-errors-of-the-past and fear-of-the-future only-the-present Grand Inquisitor speech given to Brainiac 5 in the previous segment, the whole thing sure as heck felt like a particularly nasty campaign presentation to *me*.