Erick Erickson: A New Low

John Cole notes a profoundly embarrassing installment in the conservative war on aesthetics by Erick Erickson, who mocks the “‘it’s just fiction’ defense” of Jim Webb.” (Next, those crazy liberals might claim that Vladimir Nabokov isn’t a pedophile, and Thomas Pynchon isn’t an 18th century surveyor!) Radley Balko says that “I met Erickson at a CPAC a couple of years ago. He is every bit as impressive in person as you might guess from the post linked above.” That’s pretty impressive, if only on the grounds that I wouldn’t think that anybody capable of turning on a computer could be as dimwitted and mendacious as Erickson, but evidently I’m too optimistic.

This reminds me of my favorite Erickson moment. In the midst of a truly pathetic defense of wingnut plagiarist Ben Domenech, Erickson claimed that poor Ben’s actions “appear suspicious, but only because permissions obtained and judgments made offline were not reflected online by an out dated and out of business campus newspaper.” Needless to say, a two-second Google inquiry could falsify Erickson’s claim, but the contempt that hacks of this stripe have for their audience is boundless (and, frankly, given that Erickson can still show up on the front page of Red State, may be partially justified.)