I told you all once how this is going to go down:
And should he accidentally go too far (and God knows what would actually be too far for CNN at this point) and get canned by CNN, then this is an even bigger win for Erick. Now he gets to be the victim who was silenced by the evil liberal media, and anyone who has been paying attention knows that this is the route to real riches- playing the martyr for the wingnut welfare gravy train.
In fact, as the current incentives are set up, not getting fired by CNN just gives him a steady job and the opportunity to mainstream right-wing bullshit. Getting fired is a path to riches, whether it be in the form of a book or a syndicated radio show or maybe just sympathy checks from the teabagging public. It really is a win-win for Erick, no matter what happens.
It is happening right in front of your very eyes:
RedState.com editor Erick Erickson scored a book deal with Regnery Publishing, poised to publish Red State Uprising in fall of 2010.
I suspect a steady stream of offensive but non-firing offenses until a couple of weeks before the book becomes available, and then he will drop the bomb on CNN, they’ll act shocked and fire him, he’ll be the victim, and then the book tour starts. The mass purchases will push the book up the charts, and he’ll be a fixture at FOX, on the talk circuit, and so on.
Omnes Omnibus
So getting fired by CNN is a way of making your bones in wingnuttia?
Martin
You think there’s anything he can say to get fired from Fox now?
dmsilev
“Red State Uprising”, huh? Guess Erick of the House of Erick is still trying to act out some Red Dawn fantasies.
And while things will probably play out more or less as you describe (unless CNN truly has no shame, in which case even EE might have trouble being assholic enough to get fired), at least it’ll get him back into the conservative echo chamber and out of anything vaguely resembling the mainstream.
dms
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Getting fired by any media outlet works. They’re all evil liberal outfits according to them.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Fxd.
And I know you say he isn’t a total dumbass but I find it hard to think the face that launched a thousand fake dog turds is clever enough to plot this out.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Maybe it will be a sequel to Malkin’s barnburner “Culture of Corruption” she wrote during the first the first few months of the Obama Administration. It’s been more than a year now, so the Kenyan Withdoctor should by now have extinguished all life on planet earth. And the fact that that has not happened, should not stop any intrepid wingnut from saying it did.
eastriver
I agree 110%, JC. You have plotted the future. Nice set of crystal balls, brutha.
Ann B. Nonymous
Who was that Red State non-entity that managed to get fired from Regnery? Oh yes, Ben Domenech aka “Augustine”, the plagiarist who thinks about sex with box turtles.
Cat Lady
Absurdly, it will be Howard “Conventional Wisdom/Conflict of Interest” Kurtz, who Son of Erick will be able to thank/blame. The wheels on the puke funnel wurlitzer go round and round, round and round.
beltane
Even the title of the book is pathetic. At least the claptrap produced in the aftermath of the first Red State uprising was more original and heartfelt.
How about Miscarriage of a Nation or Gone With the Wingnut?
dmsilev
@Ann B. Nonymous: Was Box Turtle Ben fired from Regnery, or just booted out of his Washington Post job? I remember that episode; much hilarity over the course of about a week.
dms
IndyLib
@dmsilev:
Well, if nothing else will do it, I’m sure he can call the President of the United States a ni**er.
Omnes Omnibus
@IndyLib:
Fixt.
Omnes Omnibus
Just think of the money that could be made by a parody troll who managed to infiltrate and get on wingnut welfare.
dmsilev
@IndyLib: I suppose, but it’d be hard to play the martyr if he went that route. There has to be some fig leaf of “I was framed by the liberal media” to cover himself.
dms
JUST A NORMAL GUY (THE ORIGINAL)
WELL YOU LIB’S OUR SO HYPOCRYTICLE ABOUT ON-AIR PERSONALITY’S. ‘LET ME KNOW’ WHEN YOU CAN FIND WHAT EVER YOU WROTE WHEN PHIL DONOHEW GOT HIRED BY MSNBC BUT THEN DROPPED SOME ‘SISTER SOUL-JAH’ RETHORIC AND GOT FIRED THEN WROTE A BOOK ABOTU IT.
dr. bloor
The only thing pushing the loaf that Erick pinches out and calls a “book” up the charts will be bulk purchases by the financing wing of the Wurlitzer.
KG
@Martin: I’m thinking “I whole heartedly endorse Barack Obama for reelection” would get him fired from Fox News. Either that or, “Sarah Palin is totally incompetent and so unfit to wield power that she should not even be allowed to use a light switch.”
Neither of those things are likely to come out of his mouth though…
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
I heard something in the news that CNN went after Bill Press for talking about Erickkk, Son of Erickkk. Press responded that he only repeated what Erickkk said (and essentially for CNN to stuff it).
CNN is defending what Erickkk said? Interesting…
rob!
Who is buying all these wingnut books since Teabaggers don’t read?
I mean, what do they use them for, to throw at black and gay people?
Crashman
The right used to have a reputation as tough guys when I was growing up. Now they’re just a bunch of pussies. Was it always like this and I just never realized it, or is this something new?
Ann B. Nonymous
@dmsilev: There was an incident over Domenech leaving out words from a Michelle Malkin book, Unhinged–one wonders if they were anti-Puerto Rican slanders emitted by Malkin in one of her fits; Domenech is of Puerto Rican descent and now self-identifies as some sort of Latino, no doubt to the immense confusion of his former frat brothers.
Domenech denied it, of course, and blamed it on a printer’s error, but he’s denied a lot of things.
Martin
@IndyLib: He called Michelle Obama a marxist harpie – THEN CNN hired him. I’m not sure ‘nigger’ is going to get the job done.
Anne Laurie
No, Ben Domenech, of Red State infamy, is “Virgin Ben” (or, since his marriage, “Possibly No Longer Virgin Ben”). “Box Turtle Ben” was a Representative — from Pennsylvania? — whose last name began with C, but I can’t remember the rest of it…
Guster
He could always say something unkind about Gen. Petraeus. Or is that, like, totally 2007?
IndyLib
@dmsilev:
I bet he could go fauxrage about something big enough to excuse him with the wingnut welfare circuit.
I can’t imagine what he could get that bent about, but I’m sure he can.
This is the guy who called on the good people of Oregon to take their state legislators out and beat them to a bloody pulp because they had the temerity to regulate dishwasher detergent, fergodsakes.
Mark S.
I thought Virgin Ben was Ben Shapiro.
MikeJ
@rob!:
Was WND or some other wingnut site that was giving away Palin’s $24.95 book when you paid $10 to join their website?
WereBear
We must be missing something in the whole conservative pundit arc. These people don’t come out of nowhere like a wingnut 42nd Street. Yes, you need to come up with outrageous metaphors and it doesn’t hurt to act dumb as a stump. But I think Nepotism is the third leg of the magic triad.
dmsilev
@Ann B. Nonymous: That sounds vaguely familiar. Too many wingnut idiocies and idiots to keep them all straight.
dms
MikeJ
@Anne Laurie: Box Turtle Ben Domenech was a staffer for Cornyn(TX).
Zuzu's Petals
Yeah, Regnery, owned by Eagle Publishing. A company whose sales tactics were so sleazy that the likes of Jerome Corsi and Buzz Patterson sued ’em:
matoko_chan
well……Erick will still be a multichin.
Why are nearly all male conservatives puffy white multichins?
demkat620
@Mark S.: Yes that’s right. Ben Domenech wrote the seminal wingnut “Wolverines” column for WAPO.
IIRC, it was John Cornyn who used the box turtle to argue against teh gheys gettin’ married and stuff.
demkat620
@MikeJ: Ah ha, now the little grey cells make the connection.
madmommy
@matoko_chan:
They were the chubby, pasty kids who got swirlies in gym class. Some of those kids get tough and get even, others retreat to mom’s basement and morph into puffy, multichin adults who spew bullsit for wingnut welfare.
beltane
@matoko_chan: Did you know that estrogen is produced in fat cells, even a man’s fat cells? These blubbering, whining Republicans have all become super femmes.
winguts to iraq
@rob!:
The best part being Teabaggers are buying these books with their unemployment and SS money.
Bubblegum Tate
Oh, come on, John. There’s no way that crazy-ass scenario could happen. Certainly not over and over again.
Oh, wait….
CatStaff
@beltane:
They wish.
Redshirt
There’s other possibilities:
By laying out this plan, Erick Son of Erick will learn of it, be amazed, and adopt it.
OR
By laying out this plan, Erick Son of Erick will learn of it, and try to somehow foil it, thus dooming himself.
OR
Or he never learns of this at all, and everything happens the way it happens.
You’d think CNN would want to jump in on that somehow. Too bad for them they’re the patsy.
cleek
OMG. too funny. this book will be an even bigger joke than Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”.
maus
@JUST A NORMAL GUY (THE ORIGINAL): He was fired for being against the war, which as it turns out was a very bad idea! And re: Soljuh moment, it would only be comparable if Erick was going to be fired for suggesting some form of assasination. Do you know something we don’t, JANG?
Violet
Yeah, this is definitely going to happen. Don’t forget to post and mark off each step as it occurs. Sigh.
It would be great if CNN had some kind of lockdown clause where if a pundit-for-hire says something egregious, they don’t get fired, but instead must apologize on air or pay a massive fine. Then they don’t get called upon to punditize except once in a blue moon. But they can’t go elsewhere, either. Effectively silence them.
dan robinson
He’s a wanker. Fuck’m.
Redhand
From one of the post’s links:
Bahhahhahhaw. You mean, like the “constitutional government” we had under Bush ’43?
Asshole!
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Redhand:
No, as the fictional Super-Action Figure Founders intended it. In the alternate universe Erick inhabits the Bill of Rights only has three amendments.
1. The government shall support the church, provided the church is Protestant. And furthermore, all of you inferior types will shut up and listen when a reaLAMErican speaks.
2. Every reaLAMErican can have as many guns as he wants because Jesus says so.
3. States can do whatever they want no matter what some elitist Congresscommies or activist judges might say.
jl
Does Blitzer run CNN? Seems like it.
Mike in NC
Shocked. SHOCKED! I tell you, that the wingnuts at Regnery would sniff Erick’s manly asshole like dogs in heat.
Sean Fucking Hannity has another book out soon. There’s no end to the fascist gravy train, is there?
hamletta
Ben Domenech got fired from WaPo for plagiarizing, probably from someone not worth the bother. I don’t think he was a Cornyn staffer, as he was hired quite young, with no accomplishments to speak of.
Senator “Big” John Cornyn was indeed the man who introduced the humble box turtle to our political lexicon via his gay-hatin’. He suggested gay marriage would lead to people marrying small reptiles. It led to his being called Senator Box Turtle, when Senator Post Turtle might have been more appropriate. See also: Senator “Man-On-Dog” Santorum.
Ben Shapiro is “The Virgin Ben” you may be thinking of. As he has since married, that moniker is most likely no longer apropos. But I could be wrong.
Brain bleach will be served in the lobby. Thank you.
hamletta
Since we’re talking about Bush Youth, I’d like to dig up this classic, from Needles On the Beach (RIP):
GregB
I’m sure Erickson will be as prescient as Dick Morris when he wrote the
propheticpathetic book that attempted to predict the 2008 election.Condi Vs. Hillary.
Jay
@cleek:
It’s contents, you mean? Of course: just a guess, but I’m assuming any tome Erick Erickson might write would probably be the just more of the usual belligerently-ignorant screeds he pollutes the Internet with at RedState; i.e. a 200-page blogpost, as intellect-free as the 200-word rants he posts online.
But as has been pointed out above, what’s IN his putative “book” is a great deal less important than the fact that he will have produced a “book” – a “book” to be hyped, promoted, sold, distributed [remaindered and pulped] in large quantities via the usual wingnut BS Machine: thus transforming this jumped-up blogger into a Major Author. Job Done.
Heywood Jablomy
CNN is not so stupid that they don’t know this. They are trying to grab back ratings NOW. There’s always another wingnut behind this one, and on and on, so they can fire and hire as they go. It’s all been gamed out. Don’t be so callow.
Little Dreamer
Very prescient John, except that it seems you were leading us to believe that the firing would come first and the book after while it appears the book is coming before the firing is even on the table. We can speculate about what it would take to get Erickson fired from CNN, but at the moment, they are still employing him.
Close though, good catch!
Little Dreamer
@Jay:
Yes, he could literally have just photocopied smears of his shit on the pages, but so long as it’s tangible (has a cover and a spine and you can hold it in your hand), and it has a price tag printed on it, that’s all that is necessary.
It’s almost got the symbolism of religious idolatry attached to it, huh? His rightwinger friends will buy it simply because it was written by ‘one of them’. Doesn’t really matter much what’s inside, I’m sure. Who wants to take odds on which page he talks about his fantasy wet dream of offing a moonbat?
Calouste
@Crashman:
Nothing new and you got it exactly right there. They have a reputation for thoughness but they are pussies.
Belvoir
And when his book appears on the New York Times best-seller list, there will be a tiny dagger next to the title. “Indicates bulk sales” it will say if you look at the fine print. And virtually every right wing book that hits the top of the NYT charts has that dagger. Pumped up the charts by mysterious “bulk sales” by Republican donors, then shat out for a buck at Costco’s and WalMarts thereafter.
Why the NYT dagger indicating “bulk sales” when it comes to right-wing books isn’t a massive scandal, I don’t know.
Church Lady
Seems like a well thought out marketing plan. I wonder if CNN will cooperate?
Mark S.
@GregB:
My local Barnes and Noble must have thought that was going to be a bestseller. They had a dozen or so copies of it in the bargain bin until a couple of months ago.
asiangrrlMN
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s my thought. I might give it a go. I can outcrazy Malkin!
@Mark S.: They held out until the bitter end, eh?
kuvasz
Book deal, eh? The favorite way the money folks who run the Right support and groom their minor league propagandists with promising futures.
russell
Erick Erickson “scoring” a book deal with Regnery is like Vladimir Lenin “scoring” a slot on the op-ed page of Pravda.
Except Lenin was, by orders of magnitude, smarter.
2liberal
I think you give you give them too much credit. They might have worn out their welcome and are starting to squabble amonst themselves. How is Erik going to get rich selling books at royalties of $0.10 per copy?
Comrade Kevin
That’s a long time to be an adolescent.
Wile E. Quixote
If anyone at CNN has any smarts, and yes, I realize that this is a dubious assertion that borders on the counterfactual because let’s face it, if they had any smarts they wouldn’t have hired that fat little southern punk, they won’t fire Erick son of Erick when he fucks up. Nope, they’ll just reassign him. Put him in a small room, with nothing but a chair in it and tell him that he’s allowed a 15 minute bathroom break every two hours and 30 minutes for lunch. He’s not allowed to have a cell phone or a computer or anything. He just gets to sit in the chair for eight hours, clock out and go home.
Silver Owl
It doesn’t take much to get published these days. lol It is so not about quality anymore. Regency will publish any garbage that comes their way. I don’t even bother with anything from them. I’m not paying for crap.
I used to think the best seller lists on NYT was actually an achievement but then when I read some of the stuff they listed I understood it was nothing but a dumpster that held register receipts.
Viva BrisVegas
The rise of EE through the ranks of wingnuttery is pretty much just a minor variation on the Beck route.
Let’s face it, CNN is a lost cause. At this stage their sole aim is to be the second Fox News, but they’re not quite bright enough to realise that the Teabaggers only need one channel to tell them what they should know.
The quicker CNN is put out of its misery the better.
TenguPhule
My upcoming New Book “Crushing the Skulls of Redstate Traitors under the Iron Heel of Liberalism” goes on sale the next day….
daryljfontaine
@Wile E. Quixote:
Vic MackeyErick Erickson could not face a more deserving fate.D
Ian
Given that Redstate.com is itself a subsidiary of Eagle Publishing, saying that Erickson has “scored” a book deal with Regnery seems a little, um, misleading.
Cacti
You would think there would be a market saturation point for ghost-written books rehashing the same talking points.
Is there a member of the wingnut noise machine who DOESN’T have a book?
Cacti
RedState.com editor Erick Erickson scored a book deal with Regnery Publishing, poised to publish
Red StateConfederate Uprising in fall of 2010.Barry
@rob!:
They probably do like the Scientologists do – they’ll have members buy them, and return them through the back door to the publisher, to be resold. That way, one could take a few thousand books, and rack up tens of thousands of ‘sold copies’.
Barry
@Martin:
I disagree (re: ‘nigger’ not being enough to fire him) – ‘marxist hippie’ is one thing, ‘nigger’ is quite another. And, of course, ‘nigger’*1,000 repetitions would do the job, even if he was Ted Turner’s son.
Toast
There’s nothing wrong with Erick Erickson that a righteous ass-kicking wouldn’t fix.
Redshirt
I wonder if part of the Wingnuts systematic attacks on the media is also to convince us – the logical people – to give up on the media as well. CNN, for example. Horse is long out of the barn, and we’ve reached the point where I now feel, and sound, just like the wingnuts of 1999 and 2000 with their unending declarations of the LIEberal MSM out to get honest Republicans.
I no longer trust a single mainstream news organization, for good reason. Mission accomplished?
Phoenix Woman
Gotta admit, John, you’ve got this one pegged. This is exactly how he’s going to work it.
Erick the Viking still hasn’t reached the Glenn Beck level of right-wing grifting, but it’s not for lack of trying.
BenA
@Belvoir:
Just to reiterate Belvoir’s point…
Look at the NY Times best seller lists
If you scan through the best seller lists it’s littered with conservative crap with the little dagger for bulk buys.
YellowJournalism
@beltane: I think a renaming the book contest is definitely in order. Winner gets a Tunch mug?
norbizness
Dude is so dumb, I don’t know how he generates the brainpower to involuntarily regulate his heartbeat.
The book should be re-titled “Y’all Got Fake Poo?” after a Mr. Show sketch.
Phoenix Woman
@norbizness:
Which is one of the things that might keep him from attaining Glenn-Beckian levels of griftery success.