Generally speaking, the science-fiction genre has been a way to tell all sorts of fairy tales with the sort of subtext you couldn't use anywhere else. H.G. Wells did this with the Eloi and the Morlocks, using them to tell a story of a working-class rebellion. It wasn't the main point of The Time Machine, but it was in there.
This approach works because the audience is watching the adventures of people a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (or just a long time ago. Or in the future. Or whatever). They don't expect those people to be us. Captain Kirk can proselytize about a better tomorrow without getting painfully preachy.
Then came Battlestar Galactica, which turned that equation on its head. In his manifesto, Moore notes that the crew of the Galactica "are you and me." But the audience still doesn't mind because they're in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. You think I would watch "Dirty Hands" if it weren't an episode of a science-fiction show? And that's just the most obvious polemic in the series; you don't have to be a partisan hack to notice that they're putting all sorts of references to the War on Terror, torture, Iraq, justice, religion, and so on into the show.
Now some of this subtext is probably just a way of making the unfamiliar familiar. For example, Roslin gets sworn in aboard a futuristic jetliner, much like LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One. I don't think they intend to compare the series as an allegory to Vietnam, and I don't think anything Roslin does particularly mirrors the Great Society, but just about everyone who watched the Miniseries could pick up on the post-Dallas mood. Cally gets to play Jack Ruby in one episode, even though Boomer wasn't a sniper and her target lived. There's a reference to the "Daisy Girl" ad, and the girl isn't even playing with daisies. Hell, there's even a point where the show digs up something familiar to the audience as a way of unsettling the audience; by the time "All Along the Watchtower" makes its appearance, you've accepted the Colonial culture as a sister culture. You don't expect them to start quoting Star Wars or listening to the Beatles. They're "us" and "not-us" at the same time, which is what makes the fact that "Watchtower" exists in their universe a big slice of wham in an episode that's already nearly reached a critical mass of wham.
But in Caprica, they're already in a familiar setting. Caprica depicts a society that is maybe 10-20 years ahead of our own (ignoring the interplanetary travel). So when this society gets hit by a terrorist attack, and a barely-competent investigator starts barging in on private property just to get some good press, it hits a tad too close to home.
Suddenly, the show has abandoned one of the central tenants of political science fiction; that this all happens to people who are not us. Caprica continues the BSG theme that these people are us, but we're looking for escapism here, not a subtext so heavy that it's become plain old text.
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