Hard to tell. The "series of tubes" moment was a very strange one to mock, because he was right---the context of that quote is that he was saying it was more like a series of tubes than like a fleet of trucks, which for the purposes of his explanation was exactly right: he was trying to explain bandwidth limitation.

There were other things he said that day that were bad, but "series of tubes" is an analogy, and a good one.

So it's hard to say what could become a Ted Stevens moment here, or which side it'll come from; someone just has to pick some statement to mock, and get lucky that it goes viral.

>The "series of tubes" moment was a very strange one to mock, because he was right

I always felt that way as well, but the way he said it was just so mockable. In the end, that's why it went viral: not because he was a dinosaur who didn't understand the Internet, but because he appeared to be a dinosaur who didn't understand the Internet, to people who themselves did not understand it.

Representative Smith can make as many factually incorrect statements as he wants; as long as they appear reasonable to the uninformed public he'll never be called on it in the way Stevens was.

  > not because he was a dinosaur who didn't understand
  > the Internet

He may have had a good analogy, but I doubt that he understood the Internet. Comments like "my office sent me an Internet on Friday and I didn't get it until today" don't really imply good knowledge of the Internet. More likely the 'series of tubes' analogy was given to him by a staffer or lobbyist and he tried to run with it even though he didn't understand it.

While likely true, that's incidental to my point of perception mattering more than reality. I was unaware of the "sent me an Internet" comment, but I'm hardly surprised. The man was not known for verbal acuity.