Howard Kurtz Allows Erick Erickson to Feign Ignorance on the Rhetoric Posted at His Blog
By Heather Sunday Mar 28, 2010 1:00pm
Howard Kurtz interviews the newest member of their "best political team on television", RedState's Erick Erickson and asks him about the hateful rhetoric that's been posted on his blog. Erickson's defense pretty much amounts to pretending he had no idea what he was saying, that he gets any traffic and he's all grown up now, so hey... no worries right? Pitiful. If CNN actually thinks this is an adequate response to their bad judgment for hiring him, they're sadly mistaken. KURTZ: Erick Erickson made his debut this week as a CNN contributor. He is a Georgia lawyer, a church deacon, and managing editor of the conservative Web site RedState.com. Erickson's hiring generated a great deal of publicity, most of the decidedly negative variety.
I spoke with him earlier from Atlanta.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KURTZ: Erick Erickson, welcome.
ERICKSON: Thanks for having me.
KURTZ: You have been getting hammered by liberal commentators since CNN decided to bring you on as a contributor to John King's program, and it all revolves around the things that you have written. So let's just go through some of them. ERICKSON: Right.
KURTZ: On the administration's health care spokeswoman, you wrote, "Linda Douglass is really the Joseph Goebbels of the health care shop." You're comparing her to a notorious Nazi?
ERICKSON: Yes, to propaganda. I probably shouldn't have said that. And to be honest with you, I got her confused with one of the congressman who, the same day she came out and was urging people to begin e-mailing in to the White House the -- forwarding on the e-mails from friends who were "misrepresenting" the president's health care plan, a congressman came out and referred to people as "brownshirts." And I got my wires crossed that day and thought, you know, if they're going to go down that road, I will too.
I probably shouldn't have, but I did.
KURTZ: Yes. And She never said that, and she assures me that she never said that.
The first lady, you wrote the following -- the headline was, "Is Obama shagging hookers behind the media's back?" And you write, "I assume not. I assume that Obama's Marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbit on him should he even think about it."
Why would you describe Michelle Obama in those terms?ERICKSON: Well, you know, back during the campaign trail in 2008, a lifetime ago, frankly, in blogging, I was very passionate, very aggressive in defending my side. And at the time that I wrote that, the Eliot Spitzer story was breaking, and the point was -- distracted by the language, obviously -- that Barack Obama was as much a creature of the media as Eliot Spitzer was. Neither have been investigated. And, you know, since that time, I've really learned, headed into, frankly, the David Souter comment, that I don't have to get personal in blogging to make my point. I've definitely evolved over time.
KURTZ: Well, let's deal with the David Souter comment. When Justice Souter announced his retirement, you said, you wrote, "The nation loses the only goat (EXPLETIVE) child molester ever to serve on the Supreme Court."Do you regret writing that?
ERICKSON: Yes, absolutely. It was about the dumbest thing I've done.
You know, counterintuitively, I guess, some good came out of it. It was the very first time I realized, Howard, how what I do for a living affects my family as well. Having my 3-year-old heckled and booed in the front yard by a neighbor, having my wife be berated at her office, you know, being a blogger, up until that moment I always considered I was just a guy chatting with friends, even on Twitter. And I realized that I actually reached a point where people listen to what I say and care about what I say, and frankly it was a wake-up call to me that I had to grow up in how I write.
KURTZ: Well, ,you know, at a time when there's this great debate about threats against Democratic -- mostly Democratic and some Republican lawmakers in the health care debate, I stumbled upon something you wrote about a Washington State controversy in which you said, "At what point do people march down to their state legislator's house, pull them aside and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?"MORE of interview with video at.............
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/howard-kurtz-allows-erick-erickson-feign-i
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