SMEARING THE TEA PARTY – AT 7:50 P.M. ET:  Dennis Prager, always a thoughtful writer and broadcaster, has analyzed the smears against the tea party, and makes some excellent points that should be made more frequently by soldiers of the MSM, but they don't dare:

Opponents of the popular expression of conservative opposition to big government, the tea parties, regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white. This is intended to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral consideration...

...The fact that the Left believes that the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea party movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea partiers...

...One of the more dangerous features of the Left has been its replacement of moral categories of right and wrong, and good and evil with three other categories: black and white (race), male and female (gender) and rich and poor (class).

Therefore the Left pays attention to the skin color -- and gender (not just "whites" but "white males") -- of the tea partiers rather than to their ideas.

That is correct.  And the value of ideas is considered greater if they come from some "oppressed" group. 

In this morally inverted world, the virtual absence of blacks from tea party rallies cannot possibly reflect anything negative on the black and minority absence, only on the white tea partiers.

But in a more rational and morally clear world, where people judge ideas by their legitimacy rather than by the race of those who held them, people would be as likely to ask why blacks and ethnic minorities are virtually absent at tea parties just as they now ask why whites predominate. They would want to know if this racial imbalance said anything about black and minority views or necessarily reflected negatively on the whites attending those rallies.

The leftist mentality has made real conversation on these issues impossible:

Unfortunately, however, no real exploration of almost any important issue in American life is possible as long as the Left focuses on the race, gender and class of those who hold differing positions. And that will not happen. For when the Left stops attacking people and starts arguing positions, we will see what the Left most fears: blacks and Hispanics at tea parties.

COMMENT:  That is also correct.  The left does not feel any need to argue issues.  Its fundamental belief is that it is so morally superior, and that this superiority is so obvious, that debate is a waste of time.  It believes that there is something fundamentally, even biologically wrong, with conservatives.  Indeed, that's why leftists so often describe conservatives as stupid. They are defective, and that explains their ideas.

It's a lazy way to see the world.  But intellectual rigor is not notable on today's political left, which is why their glass of ideas is always half empty, or less so.

May 2, 2010