In his New York Times blog, Stanley Fish offers an atrocious assessment of what he calls “anti-Hillaryism.” Fish goes from bad to disgraceful in the space of a dozen paragraphs. He writes:

She is vilified for being a feminist and for not being one, for being an extreme leftist and for being a “warmongering hawk,” for being godless and for being “frighteningly fundamentalist,” for being the victim of her husband’s peccadilloes and for enabling them.

Not true. The problem with Hillary is that she celebrates herself as the embodiment of everything and its antidote at once. She voted for military force, but not for war. She said yes to drivers’ licenses for illegals but disagreed with them in her heart. She announced that she’d found her own voice before summarily dispatching her husband on a trip across the country to speak for her.

Fish quotes Jason Horowitz from a GQ article on Hillary: “She is an empty vessel into which [her detractors] can pour everything they detest.”

More like a woman of a thousand faces. But Fish isn’t done with wrongheaded analogies. He concludes (astonishingly) of “Hillary Clinton-hating”:

The closest analogy is to anti-Semitism. But before you hit the comment button, I don’t mean that the two are alike either in their significance or in the damage they do. It’s just that they both feed on air and flourish independently of anything external to their obsessions. Anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews and anti-Hillaryism doesn’t need Hillary, except as a figment of its collective imagination. However this campaign turns out, Hillary-hating, like rock ‘n’ roll, is here to stay.

The mind reels. The stomach churns.