In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: Congressional Democrats, Health Care Legislation, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Whole Foods, Oscar Nominations, Botox, Joan Rivers, Airport Body Scanners, Yorkshire Terriers, and Joy Behar.

A friend of mine asked me if I had seen” CSI: Miami” last week. I had not, but he suggested I take a look. He thought I might find something interesting. Warning: Spoiler Alert.

Not all television shows have blatant straw men capitalists cast as Beelzebub incarnate. In fact, many stay away from this topic. Although I have not done a count, there are still too many of these shows. One of the more bizarre depictions of a CEO as a “murder for profit” Satanic imp was presented in the “CSI: Miami” episode “Bad Seed” last Monday.  If capitalists were really this evil, mankind would not have made it out of the stone ages, as all their customers would have been killed soon after each new advancement in technology. Of course, in these shows it is only the capitalists who are evil. Not government employees, local farmers, truck drivers, police officers, medical professionals, illegal migrant workers, distributors or really any other human being. Just owners of businesses are evil, because they care about profits. These characters are people who willfully engage in conspiratorial confiscatory practices and also play “God” by determining how many people it is okay to kill in order to sell a product and make a profit.

“Bad Seed” features a venal CEO of “Bixton Whole Foods” whose name caused me to pause the show on my DVR to check what I heard. CEO Beelzebub, in “CSI: Miami”, has the name “Jerry Mackey.” As someone who follows the health-care legislation wars pretty closely I could not believe what I heard. As you may know, the CEO of the real life company “Whole Foods” is named “John Mackey.” Mackey used to be viewed as a liberal icon, “a third way” capitalist so to speak. His employment practices conformed to all liberal-approved ways. His product offering is first class. Now, as one who does not believe in the efficacy of “organic foods” etc., I also have no problem with people who wish to spend more on their food for aesthetic or any other reasons. Whole Foods apparently serves a niche market of well-off urban and ex-urban yuppies quite well. I occasionally shop there myself, as their presentation is very good. The First Lady made quite a stir herself in support of organic foods which I chronicled in “Let Them Eat Arugula.”

But, even the real Mackey’s third way organic capitalism could not save him from attack when he came out against the Obama/Democratic approved health-care plan last August. As an individual who is economically literate, he just could not stand idly by and let these proposals be put forth uncontested. This caused his stores to be boycotted and for him to be demonized by the Democrats. It seems almost impossible that “CSI: Miami” was not purposely looking to subliminally equate their comic book Satan with the real life Whole Foods CEO. “CSI’s” Bixton Whole Foods CEO Jerry Mackey was purposely making statistical trade offs guaranteed to create unnecessary deaths – willfully permitting E-coli to be genetically inserted into corn to make it more “digestible,” while increasing the odds of creating a killer strain of bacteria. 

I have sometimes thought “CSI: Miami” was a conscious put on. David Caruso’s character reminds me of a cross between Jack Webb’s “Joe Friday” in “Dragnet” and Dan Aykroyd’s “Raymond Stance” in “Ghostbusters.”  But this particular episode is immoral in equating their clown Satan with the real-life Mackey. Perhaps it is all a coincidence. After all, these things happen. But I doubt it. “CSI” seemed to obviously believe in the power of subliminal messaging. I have a hunch if the real Mackey had come out in support of ObamaCare, “Jerry Mackey” would not exist; and likely neither would “Bixton Whole Foods.” Even if it were a coincidence, isn’t there anyone on the staff who noticed the linkage?

Somehow I think the answer is yes.

John Mackey – the founder, CEO and marketing genius behind Whole Foods – finds himself in an organic, unsustainable mess with his carefully cultivated affluent, liberal customer base after penning an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare.”

For starters, Mr. Mackey opens with a line from known-liberal-allergen Margaret Thatcher that features the dreaded “S” word: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Then he goes on to provide eight sensible free-market solutions gleaned from his company’s well-regarded employee health care program.

Mr. Mackey, a free-market libertarian, is now at the mercy of an unforgiving grass-roots mob intent on destroying his company. More than 25,000 people have signed on to a Whole Foods boycott on Facebook.

“Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives,” the online petition reads. “Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.”

A complementary Web site, WholeBoycott.com, features unintentionally comical video testimonials from aggrieved former customers. The mainstream media have picked up on the story and fanned the flames.

The success of Whole Foods is largely built on Mr. Mackey’s understanding of the liberal mind. It wants the good life – but with instant absolution for the sin of conspicuous consumption. Whole Foods is marketing at its best. Iconography and slogans throughout the store – not unlike those Barack Obama used to win the presidency – tell the shopper they are saving the planet in large and small ways.

The product is so good even conservatives and skeptics are willing to play along.

But Mr. Mackey missed the key ingredient of modern liberalism: intolerance to the ideas of nonliberals. And this miscalculation may prove to be devastating to his multibillion-dollar business.

Everywhere one looks these days, the intolerance of self-avowed liberals is on display. Especially since Mr. Obama came to power.

The purportedly open-minded and empathic among us who now run everything – save for NASCAR and Nashville – openly wage war against those who dare disagree.

Witness Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi’s joint-penned editorial in USA Today in which the House’s two top Democrats describe those publicly questioning Mr. Obama’s proposed health care system overhaul as “un-American.”

You can read the column in full here.

My interest was piqued even more after reading John Nolte’s post about the New York Times review of the show. Apparently, reviewer Ginia Bellafante had a hard time appreciating the foibles of a family who try so hard to be perfect in how they live and how they relate to their black neighbors that their lives become highly stressful.  To quote The Times:

But the show feels aggressively off-zeitgeist, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s when it was still possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. But who really thinks of wind power – an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show – as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?

I guess Ginia didn’t read about the increasing numbers of Americans who believe that the global warming hype is exaggerated. And regardless of whether they believe it’s true, global warming is currently at the bottom of the list of Americans’ priorities. Poor Al Gore – time for another documentary to hype the masses.

That statement also made me think of the now famous quote by elite Manhattanite and New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael after Richard Nixon’s sweeping presidential victory in 1972: “I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” Maybe like Pauline, Ginia needs to get out a little more.

As my husband and I watched the show with our 16-year-old daughter, he told her, “Your mom and I were like that back in the ’90s.” To a certain extent, it was true. We used cloth grocery bags, we were vegetarians (but not vegans), we voted Democrat and saw Republicans as evil incarnate, and drove a Geo Metro, all the while patting ourselves on the back for being so caring and progressive. I even had Greenpeace checks, with a portion of the fee to buy them going toward the organization (shudder). My husband mowed the lawn with a no-gas lawnmower, huffing and puffing as he pushed. One of our neighbors, often when he’d been enjoying a beer or two, would hop on his rider mower and mow our lawn for us, laughing at us – in a good-natured fashion, of course. (When we returned to hilly New England from the flat Midwest, that people-powered mower went the way of the dodo pretty quickly.)

So as my husband and I laughed at the Goode Family, we were also laughing at ourselves and how self-absorbed we were at one time about being “good.” The reason for our “transformation” is fodder for another article at another time.

But The Goode Family has laughs for libs too:  In the premiere episode, mother Helen tries too hard to bond with daughter Bliss by being cool and hip when talking about sex. Creeped out, in an act of rebellion, Bliss invites father Gerald to a father-daughter “purity ball,” where daughters pledge to their fathers that they will keep their virginity until marriage. When they realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, Bliss and Gerald make their escape and Bliss admits to her mother that she didn’t belong with “those people” (Christian goody-goodies).

But libs, like reviewers at the New York Times, just can’t get past the fact that one of their core beliefs – global warming – has been snubbed.

And maybe, just maybe, they have a problem with the fact that while both Gerald and Helen Goode are both bleeding heart liberal weenies, Gerald seems to be the more reasonable one: he mentions the importance of tolerance of others’ beliefs and would rather shop at the less-expensive WalMart-like store than the Whole Foods knockoff, while Helen is much more militant about everything. This flies straight in the face of Hollywood sitcom couples today: the husband is a boorish buffoon, often overweight, who couldn’t tie his shoes much less hold down a job were it not for his wonderful, bright, sexy, witty wife who almost always manages to save the day.

How dare they make a woman look bad?

Overall, the show was fun, and I plan to give it another shot next week.