Herschel, Ham-Face, and the end of "Enough"

A marriage made in hell

© 2011 Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license

Regular readers will know how I feel about the man I call Ham-Face, Erick Erickson. I believe he is possibly the worst pundit of them all — not interestingly quirky in the manner of Jonah Goldberg or Rod Dreher or Ralph Peters or any of my other bêtes noires, but just a living amalgam of everything that sucks about conservative talking heads: A bad writer with bad arguments, swinging between viciousness and sanctimony without apparent awareness of his hypocrisy, the kind of guy who’ll shoot up a copy of the New York Times in rage and then blubber about how Jesus is in charge — all without showing anything like style or a personality, all ego and ambition and shopworn talking-points.

So when the Daily Beast revealed it had proof that brain-damaged Republican Senatorial candidate Herschel Walker had paid for a girlfriend’s abortion, the Erickson tweets that ensued were in a way totally expected, in that they would be embarrassing for another writer but not for the conscienceless Double E. Behold:

It’s like a little peek into Erickson’s process: We all knew about it, what’s the big deal? followed by I mean I thought we knew about it, but I guess I could be wrong and thence some unmoored thoughts about how maybe this is damaging and so might be the other Walker messes — like the time his wife said he held a gun to her head, though we could have swapped that for the multiple illegitimate children this godly gridiron star turned out to have fathered – before Erickson finally settles on a backwards-engineered, passive-aggressive modified limited hangout route: who knows if it’s true or not but that’s not the important thing…

Finally, as things got bleaker for Walker, with his own son turning on him, Erickson admitted this was “probably a KO.” But, you know, if Walker goes on TV asks Jesus for forgiveness (after giving up on his lawsuit against the Beast, I mean) and declares himself a changed man, and it gets the rubes back on his side, you can bet Erickson will be singing glory hallelujah.

It will not then cross Erickson’s mind for a moment that maybe this candidate shouldn’t be elected to the Senate, and he shouldn’t support him, because in addition to the mental impairment that should have disqualified him in the first place Walker is a really, really terrible human being. (Not for cooperating with the abortion — for declaring abortion murder, and opposing its legality even in cases of rape and incest, while covering up his own, as well as all the other stuff.)

And why should that bother Erickson? In his mind, God’s will is the election of Republicans. If the Lord’s servants turn out to be scumbags, that just goes to show that He works in mysterious ways.

Erickson feels the same about Trump. He’s a classic Just the Tip Trumper — sometimes wringing his hands about how terrible it is that his party is so in the thrall of such an unworthy vessel (“it really is time to move on to someone who can give us comparable policy wins with some moral clarity and self-control included”) but always, when the chips are down, rushing to his defense (“The Fulton County District Attorney investigating Donald Trump is turning the investigation into a partisan event designed to help Democrats in Georgia”).

Hypocrisy is as plentiful in politics as clover in a dell, but I’ll say this for the variety practiced by the old-timers: When one of their champions turned out to be no damned good, that was usually an end to it. They let him go, rather than getting the guy over the hump only to find another hump and, after you got him over that one, finding another, etc. etc. It was not a matter of morality, but of knowing when enough was enough.

But in the modern GOP, there is no “enough.” Too much ain’t enough. So Walker will hang in — and, despite his lack of talent and anything but a simulacrum of morality, so will Erickson.

UPDATE: In his morning newsletter, Erickson writes, “Who keeps a receipt from a 2009 abortion? That’s kind of odd, isn’t it?” and “Walker is running as a pro-life Republican against a very pro-abortion ‘Reverend,’ Raphael Warnock.”