A New Low for Ham Face

Take Eric Boehlert’s name out of your whore mouth

© 2011 Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license

I’ve been following Erick Erickson for years and the radio shouter and CNN commentator is up there with Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher as a triple threat — bad ideas, dumb arguments, and shitty prose. But some days he’s the absolute Babe Ruth of bullshit, and all his signal attributes are on display here:

I had a mortifying moment on the radio yesterday. I had put new braces on about twenty minutes before. My orthodontist is insistent I keep the Invisalign in as much as possible. I never wear them on air, but he’s gotten pushy. I kept them out the first two hours, put them in for the third hour during the commercial break, and then stabbed my tongue on the braces and scrambled two words into one that sounded very distinctly not nice. The braces were out in the next commercial break and even while most people didn’t hear it, well ugh. I hate it when stuff like that happens.

Yeah that’s a shame.

Nowadays, on television and radio, if you’re a conservative you just know some group on the left will come after you for something like that.

??

I’ve gone looking and can’t find any blowback from Erickson saying something “not nice” that might be attributed to a dental accident. I do see Doonesbury quotes him in its Mudline feature: “Erick Erickson: ‘Unfortunately, it seems clear now that Kamala Harris was not a choice for diversity, but a choice to forestall the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.’” But I assume Erickson, being a piece of shit, would be proud rather than embarrassed by that.

So what’s this leftist attack Erickson’s talking about?

Look at what happened to Amber Athey.

Amber Athey has been the Washington editor of the wingnut rag The Spectator since February 2020, and also a radio host, from which job she was allegedly fired for tweeting “Kamala looks like a UPS employee — what can brown do for you? Nothing good, apparently.” (Athey claims in her Boo Hoo I Was Cancelcultured story that she was fired for commenting on Harris’ “outfit,” rather than for the alternate reason that most of the commenters to her tweet perceived. Sounds bad, kid, how about backing my call to end at-will employment? Ha ha, who am I kidding.)

As it happens, though, Athey wasn’t fired by liberals — she was fired by WMAL, an outlet of rightwing radio network Cumulus that runs shows by Dan Bongino, Mark Levin, and Ben Shapiro. (“A ‘conservative’ radio station caves to the mob,” Athey snarled.)

It’s unclear what the left had to do with her getting fired from her rightwing show by her rightwing boss, unless any time something bad happens to a conservative it’s automatically the fault of the left, like it’s the literal boogieman or “Not Me” from The Family Circus.

Anyway, why is Erickson making with this transparently bogus cancelculture story today? Turns out his wounded tongue is not his only inspiration:

The leftwing attack machine against conservative talkers was pioneered in part by Eric Boehlert during his time at David Brock’s Media Matters.

Ah, how nice, Erickson is going to honor the recently-deceased political writer by slandering him.  

… Many reporters and blue checks on Twitter are mourning Boehlert’s loss in the same way many of us on the right mourned Rush Limbaugh or would mourn someone on the right. From Jon Stewart to Hillary Clinton, they are upset at his passing. I have not seen the nasty invective against Boehlert like many of those mourning him directed at the right when Rush died. I suspect that invective is there. I just haven’t seen it (yet).

So you’re gonna create it yourself, aren’t you, you tub of shit.

Boehlert and Media Matters were progenitors of modern cancel culture. They would take audio or video of conservative talkers and use the snippets, excerpts, and often out-of-context clips to vilify their partisan opponents.

What Erickson means is, Boehlert and Media Matters republished and gave context to what rightwingers said at a site where normal people might see it, and to those people it often looked really, really bad. In Erickson’s view this had to be misleading, because why wouldn’t everyone love what rightwingers were saying, since it went over great with the guys in the “TRUMP: FUCK YOUR FEELINGS” demographic.

They were, for a time, quite effective with sympathetic producers at CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Bullshit. Boehlert was known for calling out the prestige press’ credulous acceptance of rightwing ref-working and framing.

Their efforts morphed over time into the leftwing mobs we see today.

This gets to what seems to be the nub here: When Rush Limbaugh and those guys came in and shot their firehose of bullshit at liberals, that was “the best… the gold standard,” quoth Erickson. But when liberals reported what conservatives were saying, that was The Cancelculture Mob.

When Erickson suffers an injured tongue, it’s just a few synaptic spurts to how unfair liberals are to him — when all that happened of any relevance was that a prominent liberal died.

But that’s neither the end nor the worst of it:

All of this comes as the same blue checks and reporters mourning their friend who really did pioneer smearing conservatives in the digital age are also upset with conservatives smearing opponents of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act as “groomers” and “pedophiles” or enablers of the same. If anything, those on the right doing that are just applying the lessons pioneered by progressives who for years have inappropriately accused others of racism, etc. Heck, just yesterday the Chairman of the DNC was on MSNBC accusing the GOP of fascism…

I’ve talked about this All My Enemies Are Pedos campaign before. It’s well-established that, though the smears are mostly effected by lowly bots and dipshits on the internet, they have been orchestrated by Florida governor DeSantis’ office and by Chris Rufo, the gay-bashing Goebbels of the conservative movement. These people know what they’re saying is false and defamatory, but they say it because they think if they can get just a few people with sufficient mental health issues to even kinda-sorta believe it, along with keeping the large QAnon part of the Republican base engaged, it can move numbers for them, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Whereas we who talk about conservatives’ racist and fascist statements and actions have enormous warehouses of proof of these, delivered out of their own mouths — which Eric Boehlert was smart enough to exhibit where normal people who may have never really had a good look at conservatism, except through the sunny fraud of Ronald Reagan, could finally see how depraved their ideas were.

In other words, it was conservatism itself, when unobscured, that made conservatism look bad — just as the depredations of Trump so repulsed ordinary people they were willing to elect Joe Biden to get rid of him and his gang. That’s why Erickson’s shaking his wattles at the late Eric Boehlert. Well, that and because Erickson is a stinking piece of shit.