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.