I don't know. It seems unlikely since they just won control of Congress. But something's going on. Possibly they'll stop short of pathetic and just, like, back off... just get a little civilized.
Molly Ball of The Atlantic visited Erick Erickson and begins her profile of the beefy righty with a description of him eating boneless chicken wings (what are they good for, anyway?) with knife and fork. Erickson is described as "a fastidious man who dislikes getting his hands messy with finger food..." He's known for being polite, Ball reports, but adds:
Which was interesting, because Erickson is famous for saying things that are not polite. There was the time, in 2009, when he called retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat fucking child molester.” During the Occupy protests, he said his heart was gladdened by “watching a hippie protester get Tased.” He nicknamed Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator, “Abortion Barbie.” And in a blog post considering whether President Obama was “shagging hookers,” he called Michelle Obama a “marxist harpy” who “would go Lorena Bobbit [sic] on him should he even think about it.” (The press, Erickson wrote, wouldn’t care: Obama “could be a serial killing transvestite and the media would turn a blind eye.”) ...TheAtlantic
The tea party, which used some pretty godawful and often brutish tactics during its first campaign, are his homeboys. Except his actual homeboys in Georgia's tea party. They hate him, he reports. Truth be told, checking out Molly Ball's entire profile of Erickson is kind of like wading through mud. Time for a change, I kept thinking. These conservative pundits are worse than awful by now: they're yesterday's dog's dinner. They're about as enticing as vintage gym socks.
It would be interesting to go back a little way and figure out when the self-styled conservatives on the right lost their T. Did it happen in a blazing moment that we missed or has it been happening for a while? Did they do something definitive to lose their power to anger so many? Or did they get really boring about two hours after the November midterms?
Or was Obama's smart decision to punch his way right past them after the midterms the kickoff? It certainly was a signal that the right isn't (and probably never was) as potent as it likes to think.
