On Monday, we told you about RedState.com editor Erick Erickson’s recent hyperbolic tirades, including his tweet comparing a White House health care spokeswoman to Joseph Goebbels.
But Erickson is not a no-name voice on the fringe of his party. RedState.com is a well-read conservative site, for example, and Erickson was the UK Telegraph‘s 69 most influential American conservative in 2007.
And, as Johnathan McGinty down in Georgia points out, Erickson is even an elected official himself, serving on the city council in Macon, Ga., since 2007. He’s currently campaigning to keep the police department there from unionizing, and caused a bit of a firestorm when he called union members “thugs” in an op-ed in the local paper. Local union members protested at the next city council meeting, but Erickson was nonplussed.
He called the meeting “the most fun I’ve had” since May of this year, when a fellow councilman proposed that they make President Obama an honorary member of the council. In response, Erickson proposed a series of amendments that referenced Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Obama’s admitted cocaine use.
Those amendments, which he listed on his Georgia politics blog, included “Whereas, we hold no ill will with regard to Barack Obama being the only member of the Illinois State Senate to speak in favor of infanticide during his tenure there,” and “Whereas, prior to and after entering elected office, Barack Obama felt no shame sitting for twenty years in front of a preacher who referred to the United States as the ‘U-S-of-KKK-A” and preached that white America created HIV/AIDS to infect black men.”
The proposal was tabled.
Saying inflammatory things to get the attention and ire of his opponents is Erickson’s MO. His recent “Goebbels” comment is hardly the most extreme example.
At the announcement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s retirement in April, Erickson tweeted multiple times that “The nation loses the only goat fucking child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court.”
And later, “Lefties really get offended when you point out what David Souter does in his spare time with goats and kids.”
The next day he told local blog Lucid Idiocy, “In hindsight I shouldn’t have said it. I felt good at the time saying it.”
Then in August, he banned a blogger from the front page of his Georgia blog, Peach Pundit, for quoting him. “We try here to keep the posts family friendly,” he said.
TPM asked Erickson for comment for this story. In response, he posted to RedState TPM’s entire email under the headline “Why would I bother?”
“Now, you and I both know that given Talking Points Memo’s habitual fabrication of stories and facts and constant attacks on the right, that (A) I have become someone of note the left feels threatened by and (B) this is soooo gonna be a hit job,” he wrote.
He also posted a fictional transcript of how the interview, in his view, would have gone.
