Erick Erickson, yesterday:
We have too many outrage pimps on both sides of the aisle whipping the respective bases into a frenzy and fury against the other side. I don’t have enough time or energy to be outraged about it all. There are things to be outraged by, but not everything, and certainly not with full energy dedicated to every perceived slight and grievance.
What I am finding is that among conservatives there is too much outrage, piss, and vinegar. It makes our ideas less effective. We have become humorless, angry opponents of the President instead of happy warriors selling better ideas. We are not even selling ideas.
You know what conservatives are selling? Let’s see what Erick has had for sale since Obama’s reign of socialist Muslim Kenyan terror began:
We’ve had several missions for the RedState Army of Activists. You probably haven’t noticed as we’ve primarily directed them to individual states.
This should be one for an individual state, but we need to take this nationwide and make it a national rebuke.
Meet Kent Williams. He is allegedly a Republican in Tennessee. The GOP took the State House in Tennessee and rallied to one of their own to be Speaker.
Williams had other plans. He made a deal with the Democrats, betrayed the Republicans, and got himself elected Speaker. He then put a Democrat in the number two spot.
On opening day of the legislature the outgoing Democrat Speaker of the House stood behind Williams whispering directions in his ears.
It’s clear he’s a weak mind and will be putty in the hands of the Democrats.
Here’s the assignment:
Kent Williams’ address is XXX, XXX XXX XXXX (redaction mine, not Erickson’s of course)
Go here and send Kent Williams some silly putty. Let’s put in his hands a pretty accurate representation of what he is.
That’s not all:
Olympia Snowe has sold out the country. Having been banished to our world after Aslan chased her out of Narnia, Snowe is intent on corrupting this place too.
So we should melt her.
What melts snow? Rock salt.
I’m going to ship this 5 pound bag of rock salt to her office in Maine. It’s only $3.00. You should join me.
It is a visible demonstration of our contempt for her. First she votes for the stimulus. Now this.
It’s time to melt Snowe. ORDER YOUR BAG HERE.
Let’s give it up for Red State. They know a goat fucking child molester outrage pimp when they see one.
Jay in Oregon
“The loyal opposition” my pasty white ass.
Is Erick of the line of Ericks still a CNN contributor? Or did they finally wise up?
some guy
poutrage never gets old with the Trike Force
Tone in DC
@Jay in Oregon:
Please let them have cut his sorry ass loose. Erin Burnett is bad enough, without this idiot.
srv
The comity of the Front Page continues.
Jay B.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Become? Ideas? The last idea they had was to be paranoid, humorless losers with tri-cornered hats.
Just Some Fuckhead
I don’t want to see this shit when I visit Redstate. I want to see hot bitter tears of acrimony; foot-stomping and poo-flinging. I broke down and voted for Obummer in a swing state, so I deserve it, dammit.
eemom
STOMP
Ben Franklin
It does seem to be a change in tone., If Congress should have some regrets about their past foolishness, so that we could move forward, would that be a bad thing?
Or maybe if we didn’t have today’s Republicanism, we’d have to invent it.
John Cole
@srv: This is Anne’s fault. I was writing that post for 15 minutes. She should have seen it in progress when she logged in and posted hers.
FOR ONCE, I AM INNOCENT!
mapaghimagsik
Oh, fuck him. He made his money being a reactionary attention whore. Now he’s learning?
Violet
Red State’s tag line under their header is “Powerful Conservative Voices”. Really?
Violet
The commenter “shoppegirl” is great fun to read in the comments on that post. Sample:
MosesZD
We have become humorless, angry opponents of the President instead of happy warriors selling better ideas. We are not even selling ideas.
I grew up Republican. I, as a child, helped my parents campaign for Nixon during Vietnam. I voted mixed Republican (President/Governor) and Democrat (Senate, House, Legislature) until 1992 when I voted a big FU to Bush I and went Perot and abandoned my split-ticket theory.
At no time in this Golden Age of Conservatism (which is a joke) were the conservatives a group of people with ‘ideas.’ Rather I saw they lacked ‘ideas’ and were more useful as reactionary cranks whose sole purpose was to keep the US from moving too quickly to the left.
Not stop it from going left. But just to keep it slowed so changes could, over-time, be incorporated while minimizing social upheaval that we’d experienced in the 1960s and early ’70s.
Never did I imagine they’d become what they’ve become now. They’re no longer ‘reactionary cranks.’ Rather, they’ve completely fucked-up assholes who want to drag us back into the Gilded Age while whoring themselves to every corporate and wealthy interest.
Bill Arnold
I wonder how much Silly Putty K. Williams was sent. Always had a fondness for big lumps of the stuff.
This is something like heating one’s home with junk snail mail, except a little harder to arrange, requiring an accurate mental model of Erick Erickson.
dmsilev
The comments to that first post are hilarious. Cries of Wolverines! and “Erick, you RINO!”. I assume that Ericksonsonson, being a professional GOP operative, is trying to keep his corner of the base from running too too far into crazyville. Which is interesting in and of itself.
kindness
Know one? They own the Goat Fucking Child Molester fanchise rights.
dmsilev
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I recommend you click through and read the comments. More mouth-frothing than the National Rabies Convention.
Frankensteinbeck
That’s adorable! Like many of his fellow conservative ‘thinkers’, Erickson has figured out that anger and fear failed as a strategy and he wants to find a new one. There are two problems with that, Junior: 1) Anger and fear are the most effective strategies you’ve ever had. Only anger and fear got you far enough for anger and fear to shoot you in the foot. 2) Anger and fear are your motivations. They are the core of your ideology. You are addicts, and you may occasionally say ‘I need to cut anger and fear out for my health’, but you will always accept the next fix.
p.a.
You mean RedState isn’t a guerilla website of Onion writers?
FormerSwingVoter
The Republican Party: Too Crazy For Erick Erickson
…wow.
p.a.
@Frankensteinbeck:
The truly delicious turning of the worm: when the chief propagandists and beneficiaries of rage, hatred and fear decide to change tactics, they become the targets of their own creation. Yum.
Another Halocene Human
The rock salt thing is old news. Who knows if any was actually mailed. The main nuisance would have been the Congressional P.O. thinking they had more anthrax going on when it started to leak out.
But sending rock salt to DC or ME would have cost beaucoup bux. I’m sure nothing more than a few carry-out salt-n-pepper packs stuffed into security envelopes every got mailed. The trike force is all talk.
Erick hasn’t tried any stunts like this since because he knows it would make his “following” look smaller and LESS powerful than they are, kinda an inverse Alinsky. And that ain’t good for his CNN salary negotiations.
Forum Transmitted Disease
His commenters weren’t having any of his bullshit yesterday, either. They want a diet of 100% meat, raw, and if Ewick won’t feed them they’ll find someone else who will.
MattF
Erikson has noticed that the water in the right-wing swimming pool is getting foul. The difficulty is that he has noticed this while his head is stuck in the drain at the bottom of the pool. Oooopsie.
Bubblegum Tate
Man, the commentariat are super-pissed at EsoE for saying that maybe they shouldn’t scream “Benghazi!” at the top of their lungs every 15 seconds.
Another Halocene Human
@p.a.: Well, it wasn’t exactly delicious when it happened to Malcolm X. (And nothing he said was halfway as vile as Erickerickerick’s worst screeds. Most of his shtick was to “tell them the truth and they think it’s hell”. And calling white people devils, but even by the time he started talking to Alex Haley this old Black Nationalist talking point was turning into one of these midrash things for him. The hatred was real (pre-Middle East trip, and the anger never went away) but he’s extraordinarily intelligent and intellectually honest and you can see him dancing, much like the Persians sworn to Islam under pain of death but unable to execute self-lobotomies, “we say he is a devil, because–commentary, commentary”.)
Gin & Tonic
I’m no fan, but contrasting what he said today with what he said four years ago? This is commentary? Maybe somebody can hit the hanging curve ball of pointing out what a douche you were a few years ago, too.
Another Halocene Human
@Jay in Oregon: Is Erick of the line of Ericks still a CNN contributor? Or did they finally wise up?
No, but the odd thing about the Both Sides Do It network is that they seem to have changed Erickckckck more than he changed them.
First, the makeover. Then, the energies withdrawing from his blog. Then the crap during the Romney campaign, where Erick, introduced to feeds of information outside the wing-o-sphere, tries to distance himself from the losing candidate (in order to save face and those streams of sweet sweet cash from CNN) but gets savaged in his own comments section. Then the retreat to calm shit down. Then Romney’s humiliating loss. Now he’s pissed at his commentariat and even more confirmed in his identification with his “peers” at 30 Sweet Sweet Cash Place.
Eventually, Erick may aspire to the priesthood of High Broderism and get a sweet sweet newspaper gig wisely intoning “Both Sides Do It”.
Getting a Brooksy perma-PBS plum would be right up his alley if he can play his cards right.
Violet
@Another Halocene Human:
It was mailed.
Another Halocene Human
@Frankensteinbeck: It’s really just fear, interspersed with explosions of rage.
I was mulling why Malcolm X seemed to be able to think so logically when under the influence of such hatred (he looked back and declared himself during his peak NoI years as “insane” but he surely wasn’t Bircherite loopy), but the main diff was probably that he wasn’t scared of shit. Probably on account (at first) of being a true believer (unlike 99% of bible-believing Christians, I mean the ones who tell you so within 10 minutes of meeting them) and in time because he was at peace with himself and had nothing to be fearful about.
Fear makes for extremely distorted thinking. Fear is all the GOP has left.
Just Some Fuckhead
@dmsilev: I read those last night. shoppegirl should try her hand at spoof, if she isn’t already.
When one of the tards there told her she should get involved and DO SOMETHING, she replied she’d been fasting and praying. I laughed out loud.
piratedan
The comments, well they pretty much sum things up there don’t they?
I love how these fucking deficit hawks and fainting couch debt observers ever managed to wipe themselves when Shrub the Younger was busy putting two wars on the country’s credit card and are now all busy extracting the thong and wondering why it smells.
Then they have to ponder why the debt is bringing the country down all the while completely ignoring the rise of the corprocracy where people are relegated to fodder and nobody knows how to make anything anymore, its now all about greed is good and worshiping the almighty dollar.
Yes the long term debt has to be serviced, that’s what taxes do and ending the wars are all about. That’s why we have the first step with the ACA to begin to roll back health care costs. These dimwits have had this shit explained to them and they still can’t connect the dots.
Schlemizel
@Bill Arnold:
Somewhere around here I have a link to a place that sells the stuff in 5 pound bricks. I sent one to my kid when he was country. I have the feeling a lot of it got spread around to other units.
It wasn’t that expensive either, around $30. I’ll see if I can find it again & post.
MikeJ
@Gin & Tonic: Erikson hasn’t actually changed his beliefs, he’s simply arguing that Republicans will do better if they look less crazy. Actually being less crazy isn’t an option for them.
Ash Can
Sounds like someone’s sweet CNN gig is in jeopardy unless he dials back the crazy. I’m guessing the truth about Erickson and his cesspool blog is getting a little too well-known among CNN’s overall viewership, especially after the most recent gun massacres, and CNN’s management is starting to feel the heat regarding having a seditious lunatic shitheel in its lineup.
Another Halocene Human
@Violet: Aha, no trip to the PO required! Clicking stuff on Amazon would but right up their alley, wouldn’t it? $4.95 on Amazon.
I wonder then why this stunt wasn’t repeated?
Violet
I think this is my favorite line:
He’s telling that crew to “be happy”? Do they even know how? They are the party of fear–they create it, advertise it and sell it. Fear does not breed happiness. And ordering people to be happy will not make it so.
Frankensteinbeck
@Another Halocene Human:
I think there’s plenty of anger, but that anger comes from fear. The world isn’t what they believed it was. For the Christianists, for the Conspiracy Theorists, for the Angry Old Men and the Ignorant Racist Hate Addicts, a black man being elected president was impossible. A lot of them were struggling with this strange new world as it was, but Obama’s election showed them that their fantasy of belonging to the overwhelmingly dominant culture was… a fantasy.
Violet
@Another Halocene Human: In the original Red State post, Erik included the link to the Amazon store. So all his followers had to do it click through. I bet Red State even got a cut from the clickthrough. Kind of amusing that even though it was that simple and not very expensive, in about five days he only got 240 people to do it. Trike force, indeed.
Another Halocene Human
@piratedan: the high cost of faux-populism (aka nazism)
Violet
@Frankensteinbeck: Perhaps they are afraid the non-white folks will treat the white people as badly as the white people treated them.
weaselone
@Another Halocene Human:
As a private citizen, the receipt of 1,200 lbs of rock salt would pose an irritating dilemma, but I would probably stuff my garage full of it and try to find people and charities that could make use of it. For a politician in Maine with winter approaching it was probably a good opportunity for some community outreach. I can see donations of rock salt to local charities, churches and even passing it out to constituents as being quite popular.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
This. They don’t understand the Golden Rule. They think it says “expect others to do unto you as you have done unto them”.
Frankensteinbeck
@Violet:
Very possible. After all, what do these groups have in common? They’re mean, spiteful assholes.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Erick, Son of Erick, has a new post up where he quotes a rant from another Redstate member that depicts exactly what he was talking about in the post this thread is about. Grab your popcorn and open a tab in your browser, the shit is gonna fly!
Erick is nuts if he thinks he is going to be able to get this car back up on the cliff while it’s plummeting to the bottom of the canyon.
Baud
Apologies if someone has already mentioned this, but my guess is that Erick sees the handwriting on the wall with the extreme conservative movement and he is now trying to position himself as a mainstream Villager.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Baud:
Yep, and after his readers rip him to shreds, he’ll prolly switch to the Democratic party.
Chris
@Jay B.:
This.
While there was a time when the Republican Party had ideas, there has never been a time when conservatives (in any time or place) did. Their only “ideas” are to recycle the ideas of revolutionaries who have been dead long enough to be fashionable. “Conservatism is the blind and fear filled worship of dead radicals.”
? Martin
@Baud: Eric doesn’t see shit. The GOP leaders have determined that going full-McVeigh on the nation is a bad strategy and they’re trying to reign everyone in. Eric is just following orders here.
SatanicPanic
Woah, their coalition really is coming apart. HAHA
Another Halocene Human
@weaselone: Oh, I do recall the gleeful spread of this story, the sort of Br’er Rabbit nature of it, “Oh gosh, whatever will I do with all these pounds and pounds of rock salt in Maine? Don’t send me any more. Don’t, please.”
Calouste
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
As someone said on here when Gingrich surged during the GOP primaries last year:
“The base wants all killer, no filler, and none of that shit of the new album.”
Another Halocene Human
@Chris: “Worship” being several degrees removed from actually reading them.
Baud
@? Martin:
Perhaps. IIRC, however, the GOP usually signals a change in strategy by having their various media voices parrot their new talking points to their audiences (a la 1984). What they usually haven’t done is tell their audiences directly that their current attitude is wrong. If Fox News starts adopting Erick’s strategy, I’d be more inclined to agree with your theory.
Violet
@Baud: Is Erik really a full-fledged member of the conservative media? He’s on CNN, not Fox. Did they not want him on Fox?
scav
Readership Capture: Not just cries for more photos of TUNCH!!!!! anymore.
gbear
The zombie of Hubert Humphrey should visit Erickson and eat his brains for even suggesting that his kind could ever be ‘Happy Warriors’.
Baud
@Violet:
I think he probably gets and usually adheres to the GOP talking points of the day. I don’t know why he’s on CNN (maybe money), but the wingnuts like to gain creditability by being on “traditional” outlets.
Another Halocene Human
@Baud: He’s their token [redacted] “conservative” voice.
JCT
@piratedan:
Because the President is blah, get with the program. Sigh.
Hungry Joe
Without anger and fear they got nothin’.
Humphrey must be up to 7500 RPM by now.
JCT
@Baud: Grifters gotta grift after all.
These idiots have opened Pandora’s Box and are at an utter loss regarding what to do with all of the industrial strength stupid they have unleashed.
POPCORN!
Roger Moore
@JCT:
I don’t think that’s all. It’s also important that PPACA helps poor people, taxes are going up mostly on the rich, and ending wars hurts defense contractors.
dance around in your bones
Jeebus, what a waste of space E-sonof-E is. JC, I know you guys used to be buds back in the day, until you saw the light – but Jehoshaphat when I see that guy on the TV machine I just want to slap his smug face.
Just slappity slap slap, Erik’sdotter.
The Tragically Flip
I’m really not clear what he thinks the Republican establishment is supposed to be doing aside from funneling vast sums of money to defeat Obama (with much of it sticking to grifters like Erickson) and opposing everything at every legislative and legal venue possible.
How many more Obamacare repeal votes should the House have held?
Is he mad they didn’t actually cause a full US default over the debt ceiling?
JCT
@Roger Moore: I completely agree in the global sense, but my reply to piratedan was more of a nudge regarding the truly noxious type of wingnut we see out here (we both live in Arizona) — deep racism coupled to paranoia runs through everything.
redshirt
It’s a fascinating dilemma to watch unfold on the right wing blogs, for it is the same process which is occurring in their Primaries and party political activities. Anyone reasonable or remotely sane is seen as a traitor to the cause, and some firebrand steps up to take them on/out. In real politics, crazy money is funding this. On the internets, it’s just the crazy.
You can get a great understanding of the right wing ID in real time by reading Free Republic, Redstate, Breitbart, etc. If you can stomach it. If your soul can take it – for it is truly a cesspool of hate, ignorance, fear, xenophobia, you name a bad emotion or behavior, and there it lives – on right wing blogs.
Frankensteinbeck
@Roger Moore:
Hurting the poor in the name of tough love has been a consistent Republican desire since at least the 80s (I wouldn’t know before then). Brokaw’s recent rants about how the 47% are going to have to give up their entitlements are a perfect example. They mean this stuff. They are, let’s face it, assholes.
But when a black man became president they went ballistic, flailing violently and attacking anything that they associate with him. He likes to help people, so empathy became a dirty word.
I guess what I’m saying is: Relax, it’s both!
West of the Rockies
@dmsilev: Oh, man, if his readers are calling Erick a RINO, then the conservative movement has really fallen off the edge of the flat world.*
I heard a report on NPR this morning, and it was filled with the ludicrous words we’ve come to expect from those who vote Republican, including calls for the birth certificate and charges of socialism. One moron noted that we’ve never “seen” any of Obama’s college professors. Hmmm, I don’t recall a demand for Bush’s professors to be trotted out onto a stage for review.
Well, Erick’s gotta make a dollar, and he’s been a long-time contributor to rage-utainment for the far-right. Now maybe he’s seen that future dollars will come from a more centrist position.
* Of course, some wingnuts believe the earth is flat.
Liberty60
Something appears to be happening in Wingnuttopia:
Allahpundit yesterday:
They have moved past the point of thinking it is just the MSM denying the vast pool of latent Real Murkins; they are starting to grasp that the American electorate really has heard their message, and rejected it.
redshirt
@Liberty60: They’ve perhaps contemplated that, but the lesson they’ve learned is they need to cheat harder. These other voters cannot be trusted with the sacred power of voting. Clearly.
Bubblegum Tate
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I think my favorite part is “Eric Holder announced that no black people will be prosecuted for crimes against white people.”
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Bubblegum Tate:
I thought this response to the post was on target:
LOL! Someone there gets it though:
I disagree, it’s a good start though.
Mr Stagger Lee
@dance around in your bones: But maybe just maybe Erick is experiencing, a conversion on the road to Damascus, getting ones ass burned by his followers, may drop the scales from his eyes. Ok you could stop laughing….please…please.
dance around in your bones
@Mr Stagger Lee:
I’m stifling myself, like Edith. (ouch, it hurts).
Countme-In
My favoritest shoppegirl line was “more die from snowboarding than waterboarding”.
At this, the murderous Redvermin filthatariat dropped their collective inadequate dicks and repaired to their respective garages, cleared away the Vince Foster stunt melons, and got straight to work on designing lethal snowboards for the long list of Others — liberals, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, RINOs and all Jews to the left of the Rabbi Kahane — they’d like to see dead, starting with the Presidential children.
As the Census worker the cracker dickhead Erickson shot dead back in 2009 (with his twat’s shotgun for the crime of knocking on the latter’s door and inquiring as to how much straw was needed to furnish their children’s bedrooms) said with his last breath in the ambulance on the way to the morgue: “Fort Sumter? I thought this was Macon.”
Erickson is mellowing his grift in much the same way John Wilkes Booth, the founder father of the modern Republican Party, might have opened a gift shop next door to the Ford Theater, had he lived to refine the moneymaking possibilities of his personal psychopathy.
Erick, like Eric Cantor as he rounds a corner in the Capitol to confront the media cameras, has developed this odd stage smile like a reptile taught to show human pleasure by aliens who had studied human beings from a distance of a galaxy or two.
The two of them raise both sides of their upper lips to show some teeth. This denotes both excruciatingly painful and contemptuous greetings to those they f*cking hate AND the stench of triumphant liberalism hitting their reptilian olfactory apparati.
Real reptiles are not amused.
jibeaux
@Bubblegum Tate: that is a fun thread. I like how some of them talk like they’re improv-ing Biblical times; “truly I say unto you” kind of stuff.
Patricia Kayden
If you enjoy wingnut tears of despair, check out the comments on that Erickson post. Priceless. “Hitler”, “socialism”, and “leftists” pepper the wailing. Poor dears!
Love it!
I wanted to comment to rub the salt in, but no way am I going to register on RedState.com.
aj
@John Cole: thats a first
piratedan
@JCT: I know, I know… just so incredibly maddening to hear the same crap repeated everywhere without any sense of context whatsoever or even any acknowledgement that steps are being taken to address what they profess to care about (whereas you and I know it’s the only semi-legitimate stick that they can use as leverage and then again only with the same amount of half truths and duplicity that they’ve brought to every other issue)
johnny aquitard
@Violet:
Knew some die-hard neo-confederate bigots when I lived in Georgia who said this exact thing. It’s really amazing to see such shallow minds and how they ascribe to everyone else what their own impulses would be. They’d mistreat blahs in a flash if they could. They do all the time when they can. They believe everyone else naturally thinks that way, so obviously that’s what the blahs would do if the shoe were on the other foot.
So they say they’re just doing what would get done to themselves, which in their mind justifies it.
Zach
@Gin & Tonic: This.
Zach
@Gin & Tonic: This.
Zach
@Gin & Tonic:
This.
Zach
@Gin & Tonic
This.