Frank Rich Writes in today's NY Times:

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Read; The Rage Is Not About Health Care 

Related

In March, CNN made stunning announcement that Erick Erickson, editor of the ultra-right Tea Party screed Redstate.com (owned by Eagle Publishing, owner of malodorous HumanEvents.com) would be a regular panelist on the new "John King's USA" program.  We get the media we deserve, and I was loath to roll over for one more indignity. I got a little worked up about it.

So We Made A Video About CNN's Latest Farce

My video partner, Oilwellian and I felt this reckless erosion of CNN's responsibility was so egregious that it needed a simple polemical response that called attention to it. 

Enough is Enough — How You Can Help

 

Educate Time-Warner Stockholders

Show them just how fast and loose CNN executives, Jon Klein and Sam Feist are being, You can be sure their stockholders have no idea what kind of unhinged propaganda they are presenting to the American people in their pursuit of a few of Fox New's ratings points.

PLEASE RETWEET this post (see below), so a viral pressure might goose @CNN to stop this Fox-chasing nonsense and try being a real news network again.  It took them two years to admit the Lou Dobbs mistake, so I don't have a lot of hope that they'll can this stupid Erickson idea too soon. But at least this exposure can make it painful for them. We have only 24 hours left to make video go viral (and get special notices on YouTube). Your RTs and emails would help a lot.

IT'S IMPORTANT:  Even though John King USA's show is pretty boring (King was never mister magnetic), and the nepotism shown by using his wife Dana Bash as the show's (Republican friendly) Congressional reporter makes the show a laughing stock,  that doesn't mean this farce should stand, unassailed until the inevitable cancellation. The experience may make CNN just a bit more sensitive to the fact that the Tea Party ain't the only Americans fired up, lately.

Some of us are just disgusted with the corporate wrecking ball that American capitalism—and our media—have become. It's time we just said no, and meant it.

JOIN OUR FACEBOOK SITE:

DumpCNN

FOLLOW THESE PEOPLE TWITTER: 

@DumpCNN ~ @shoq ~ @stopbeck ~ @Oilwellian

Backstory

I have already invested a fair amount of time being the partisan crasher on Twitter on this issue, but it's just not something we can afford to shrug off after a few days of whining.  The right assumes, as CNN's Jon Klein did, that "progressives never get too worked up about anything".

In Retrospect, Our Video Was Too Kind

The right has screwed up this nation too thoroughly for us to just acquiesce to CNN giving a platform to the latest overrated stooge of concorporate hegemons.  As the past few years have proved, they own or control most of this nation where it counts, and even when progressives score gains (as we just did with Health Care Reform), there is still a huge question mark hovering over the future of the United States. A recovering economy will not mask the near-kleptocratic nature of what our modern predatory-capitalist-system-run- amok has become.

Through one of many proxies like Redstate, the corporate and conservative elites use massive private funding networks to distribute professionally crafted propaganda masking as "grass roots" efforts.

Their work is designed to prey on the emotions and fears of an almost fundamentalist fervor amongst the ignorant Teahadist soldiers they are whipping up across the nation. The primary goal is to convince these gullible—or just rich, mean, racist, or stupid—people, that the administration that inherited the burden of fixing the economic malaise they created, are actually the people who caused them in the first place.   And when you have a 24 hour news channel (Fox News) devoted to such efforts, it's really not all that hard to sell such foolishness to the proles.

This professionally-crafted and marketed lying has gone on far too long—and it's wrecking this nation. And yet, as I type this, the US Chamber of Commerce is gearing up to spend more millions of dollars in local elections. Precisely the kind of spending secured with the kind of right-wing propaganda that HumanEvents, Redstate, and Erick Erickson represent (often literally).

Below, I have created one of my "capsules" to provide some background on CNN's latest gift to the nation, and to the right wing groups and strategies that have crippled it: Erick Erickson.

Responses

Overview of Erick Erickson

There is not much about this creep to like. Let's just say he's a man of average means, who now has way above average influence in a Republican party that respects only results, regardless of outcomes. A full picture of him will emerge from the materials, herein.

   Backgrounders

   Redstate.com

Redstate is a property of one of the most loathsome right wing publishing enterprises in the world.

  Parent & Related Organizations

Related

   Previous Lessons CNN Didn't Learn From

   The Growing Threat Of The US Chamber of Commerce

   More From Shoq

Partisan Crashers: CNN Knows What It's Getting with Erickson

Make no mistake, CNN knows exactly what it's getting with Erickson — and it wants just that. Sam Feist's a spectacularly pompous ass, and his fingerprints are all over this hire; as much as I'd love to wind up eating my words, I can't imagine a scenario in which a blogger uprising from the left would make Feist and CNN reconsider putting Erickson on the air. In fact, they're probably enjoying the immediate rush of attention that they'd counted on all along.


Huffpo's comments are limited to 250 words. That just wasn't enough room, so I posted some of this there, and linked back here. I hope they post it. Obviously, you should read it before continuing.

Chaz,

As one of the more visible of those "left leaning" partisan crashers on Twitter, inundating CNN with "bloodthirsty outrage," I am amused by the sheer volume of words you have just expended, basically saying "Oh, those CNN boys will be boys?"

 Are you so cynical from your years helping these unwholesome whores, that you simply roll over and let them fail or succeed with their gambit without even a token cry of outrage or resistance?  Do you think you're educating us by telling us that they knew full well what the reaction would be to hiring Erickson? That was obvious from the first tweet from Sam Feist, and the cover fire he'd already arranged with his troopers like Ed Henry, who were armed with the corporate talking points before the words hit the first browser.

Your screed is precisely the kind of droll, oh-so-worldly, inside baseball acquiescence to what these concorporate tools do, that gave us Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Malkin in the first place. In 2005, FAIR captured Jon Klein admitting how predictable such muted, weak-kneed reactions from the left have become.

Almost as if bragging about how silly it is to not understand the ratings rationales of the big boys, you sound far too willing to just accept—with nary a word of objection—one of the more influential conservative voices on the web as a regular co-host, just before the most important midterm election of our lifetimes.  And If you think they  hired Erickson just to pilfer a few Fox ratings points, you are more politically naive than he is homophobic. 

Erickson is not "some blogger." Redstate, Human Events, and their parent, are linchpins of a very well oiled GOP message machine that is now cross-connected with a dizzying array of social networks that reach all the way down to the school board level.  All this new Ministry of Untruth needs is a visible minister up there in the pulpit each day.  By allowing CNN to put one of the functioning heads of that machine on TV every night is almost inviting electoral genocide in November. They could only get a more strident and dedicated mouth organ if Rush Limbaugh or David Koch took the job.

Your tone suggests you're almost looking forward to this, as if your media and country were a game, put out there for your snarky-good entertainment value. But on your blog, you also "kind of like Andrew Breitbart," another low-life partisan demagogue doing his level best to wreck democracy while he profits from selling the poison seeds of its demise. Perhaps it wasn't your intent, but that doesn't matter.  You're far too cavalier about sitting up on the hill, from a distance, and watching yet another preventable train wreck happen before our national eyes. My gut tells me you probably have health insurance.

CNN and it's legions of modestly talented pseudo-journalists, and the flaming blowhards like Breitbart and Erickson are not our biggest problem. It's the progressive hand wringers, and oh-so "in the know" insiders, blithely accepting the indignities forced upon us each day, who support and empower the evil that these men and women do to us, our spirit, our nation, and our future.

Instead of pretending you know so much about what motivates the people who once put food in your mouth, why don't you turn your skilled pen toward writing something that exposes what they do—in detail—so others are better armed to combat them, now, and in the future.

You may really enjoy this media meltdown, sliding another steaming heap of corporate re-manufactured slime another few feet down our throats each week.  But some of us have had more than enough of it.