All posts tagged "Erickson"

I fully confess to having an endless fascination with the sexual hang-ups and weirdnesses that seem to fuel the conservative movement, particularly the religious right. Erick Erickson's latest emission is particularly delightful in this regard, and feels, I have to say, like a weird form of projection. Erickson claims the mainstream media would be up in arms about the latest non-scandal that the right has cooked up---basically, that the HHS is tweaking the rollout of Obamacare, as if no bureaucracy has ever engaged in troubleshooting a policy in the history of bureaucracies before---but really, it's an opportunity for him to accuse journalists and liberals of being perverts who have sex fantasies, something he has heard about but no doubt swears he does not have.

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For the past eighty years, the Augusta National Golf Club has invited the CEO of IBM to the Masters to be fancy and do whatever it is that boys do when they're alone and being fancy. (I dare not hazard a guess.) This year, however, the Masters may discontinue its eighty-year-long tradition because the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, is a -- wait for it -- woman.

[rebelmouse-image 24749940 original_size="400x300" expand=1]In what may really win the award for tastelessness in the ongoing contest of conservatives to see who can deflect criticism of their lies and eliminationist rhetoric the hardest, Erick Erickson may win with using the occasion of the attempted murder of a Jewish congresswoman (and the deaths of six others) to launch a maudlin recruitment ad for Christianity. (Though, it's hard to be conservatives using the occasion of an attack on a Jewish woman to claim that criticizing them is "blood libel".) This sort of thing is sadly inevitable; amongst fundamentalists, blaming atheism (and evolutionary theory) for murder and mayhem is a favorite tactic.

The main thing I got from Erick Erickson's rants about how he's going to threaten American Community Survey workers with death if they try to survey him is that he thinks that embryos have more moral value than government workers. Though there is some hair-splitting there. As Digby notes, Erickson wants it to be very clear that he's not saying that it's okay to start violent altercations by waving shotguns at Census workers, but ACS workers? Absolutely. The reason is that he takes a Biblical literalist approach to the Constitution.