Dissident Prof is getting whiplash every time she visits the website for the Center for American Progress.
Eric Alterman, Senior Fellow and “distinguished professor of English” at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, asks in his most recent article, “Why Do the Mainstream Media Like the Tea Party More than Occupy Wall Street?”
The professor cites that highly esteemed academic journal, The New Yorker, where “Ben McGrath described the Tea Party as a motley collection of ‘goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militia-men, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers”—those who remained convinced that [President Barack Obama] was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya,’ intent on turning the United States into an Islamic Republic.”
While Dissident Prof appreciates the display of creative writing skills in the quoted passage, she hardly thinks it fits in well with the high seriousness of the article as attempted by the passage that follows:
Four academics confirmed this telling portrait. They recently presented a study of the views and attitudes of 2,000 voters sympathetic to the Tea Party at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The study said that these voters ‘reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration.’”
(Funny, these “four academics” never called on Dissident Prof, herself an immigrant, and a tea party supporter, for her opinion.)
But it must be true because it’s from the esteemed American Sociological Association. (Sometimes those of us consigned to perpetual adjunct-hood get an inferiority complex.)
This thought, however, was interrupted by a little birdie chirping on Dissident’s Prof’s shoulder, “Authoritarian Personality, Authoritarian Personality” (or was it the Aflac duck?)