Fish says Tea Party is much more formidable than liberals realize

Meanwhile, Stanley Fish (speaking of evil Nibelungen) is advising Democrats to stop expressing contempt for the Tea Party, because every time they do so, the latter grows stronger.

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Sophia A. writes:

In the Fish article, he quotes Rove:

Karl Rove has expressed alarm at the emergence of candidates who “did not evince the characteristics of rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity, and character.”

There is a belly laugh in there somewhere—or is it a desperate chortle?

In any case, there is mirth to be had!!

September 29

Tim W. writes:

Stanley Fish is right that all the condescending attacks on the Tea Party and its candidates are largely backfiring. But he still regards these average Americans as being rubes. He’s just warning that there’s a lot of them and the left had better be careful about ridiculing them too harshly. He regards the left as so stunning in its intellect that it can weaken the Tea Party not by sneering at it but by engaging it in high level debate, thus showing the elite left’s superiority.

The problem with that argument is that it assumes the left and its candidates are somehow intellectually capable of pulling that off. Among the Tea Party’s leading critics we have Bill Maher, a guy who has appeared in public wearing a diving suit with a bloody prong sticking out of it to make fun of Steve Irwin’s death. We have the MSNBC bozos. We have “Mensa candidate” Senators such as Boxer and Murray. We have political dynasty hacks like Cuomo. We have Al Franken. We have the “stunningly brilliant” Congressional Black Caucus. We have professional Latinos like Loretta Sanchez. We have Huffington and Kos. We have Dionne and Cohen and Kurtz. We have Pelosi and Reid. We have Obama and Biden.

Exactly who in that bunch is going to intellectually whip the Tea Party?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 28, 2010 08:47 AM | Send