As always, I’m better than you. I cook onions.
Blogger extraordinaire Erick Erickson has a fascinating essay linked via Hotair yesterday. It’s called Reality Check. He definitely needs one.
In truth we offered him one of those back in 2012 when he was so impressed with his own media ascendancy that he decided to disdain all bloggers who weren’t interested in becoming partisan political activists.
So imagine our surprise when we read yesterday that he is repelled by the “politicization of everything.”
He begins with typical modesty.
Two nights ago I posted my thoughts on being on radio. I followed it up on radio yesterday afternoon. In both, I made this observation:
No one likes people who talk politics all the time. I’ve spent an entire segment once on the fine art of browning onions in butter. And you know what? It’s been a widely requested segment of my show for repeat airings. People care about more than politics and, on radio, they want to know the guy they’re listening to on the way home does too.
First, it is absolutely true — I spent 20 minutes on the radio talking about browning onions in butter and how cookbooks lie that it only takes 10 minutes. It has been a highly sought after segment of my radio show. But second, people were downright offended that I’d suggest there is more to life than politics. I’ve gotten angry emails from a lot of people on the left and the right.
On this point, hat’s off to him. If he can mesmerize a radio audience for 20 minutes on the subject of browning, er, caramelizing onions, he’s the Limbaugh of cooking. I’ve watched dozens of cooking shows involving this procedure, some by Michelin starred chefs, and I’ve never heard any of them take as much as 20 minutes to explain how to do it. But he’s not the Limbaugh of politics.
He leaps from onions to these extraordinary statements:
When I point out I find some things the President does, like talking about sci-fi, endearing and find Michelle Obama to be a very beautiful First Lady, my conservative friends go insane. While I was at CNN they were convinced I had sold out to the liberal media. Now, at Fox, it just perplexes them.
When I talk about my faith and my views on gay marriage or abortion, liberals are convinced I must be lying when I say I have gay friends and pro-abortion friends and we get along just fine and they are wonderful people. Surely I must think they are going to hell and how could those people be friends with me. Folks, I think we’re all going to hell, but by the grace of God.
There are subjects I do not tackle with friends with whom I disagree because I value their friendship far more than I value my view on some subject that divides our ability to be friends. As a Christian, to me evangelism and sharing my faith is much more about being a good friend to someone, regardless of their faith or world view, than about being right in an argument or going to some beach in Mexico to work on my tan while I hammer a nail or two in a hut and speak Jesusese to a total stranger.
Jesusese? What an ass. This isn’t Christianity. It’s a recycling of the “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” self-help pap from the 1960s. It’s also a beautiful illustration of what I said in my post about Erickson a year ago:
It’s just that the post struck me oddly. Simultaneously defensive, almost guiltily so, and yet condescending in the extreme.
What we’re seeing here is someone who is perhaps incurably shallow. He builds himself a successful media career talking about the nuts and bolts of policy issues, campaign races, where conservatives should align themselves right now to score political wins, and just as with his own avowed religion, he misses everything important. While he thrives on the politicization of everything that has secured him gigs on CNN, Fox, Laura Ingraham, etc, he is naturally bored by any exclusive focus on what he clearly has come to regard as a game. Post and riposte. No harm, no foul. Just talk.
But it isn’t a game. Just as Christianity isn’t. The country and the whole world are at stake.
He equates gay marriage with abortion. Well, same-sex marriage may be a game, a Hollywood-driven fad that will blow itself up in the reality of gay male promiscuity and lesbian cat fighting. Abortion is not a game. I’ve lost patience with everyone who can’t see that it’s a sickening, violent act of murder that can’t be camouflaged with obscene euphemisms like “women’s reproductive health.” I don’t want to be “good friends to them.” And I certainly don’t think they are “wonderful people.” It’s a deal killer, an ender of friendships. Final.
The same with the current political environment in the United States. The freedoms that are being attacked, being lost day by day, will ultimately kill millions if not billions of people. I don’t give a shit about Obama’s “endearing” sci-fi interests or basketball brackets. I don’t give a shit about Michelle Obama’s looks, especially given that the only thing I notice about her is a constant resentful sneer. That’s not attractive to me in any woman, let alone a First Lady of the United States.
I don’t care about political horse races, congressional maneuverings and deals, and the hijinks of the Fed and the unlimited number of government agencies whose overpaid secretaries and deputies and unions seek to impose their will via this and that regulatory gambit. I care about what the loss of integrity and morality and commitment to our heritage are doing to the greatest nation ever established. That’s not politicization. It’s dirty, filthy, evil politics. Erickson doesn’t know the difference. Because he has good friends at CNN and the country club.
Politicization is something else. It’s the conversion of the MSM from investigative journalism to a leftist propaganda organ intent on injecting political opinions into every aspect of our contact with news, entertainment, and education. Why people are getting angry. Because there’s no place left to be free of idiotic insults on traditional values and faith without disconnecting entirely. Meaning we are being driven fiercely out of the national debate about who and what we are and should be. The Ericksons are the jolly whores who facilitate the process by propping up the pretense that we have a voice lefties tolerate.
Is there more to life than politics? Sure. But politics gets incredibly important when it starts suppressing, oppressing, and costing human life. Everyone here knows that I talk about more than politics. I don’t, however, regard politics as merely a tool for getting attention.
But I’ll give Erick the last word, because his last words really do tell the tale. For him it really is all about him. The good news is that he’s just above the rest of us. The good Christian with wonderful pro-abortion friends who tells his nominal conservative allies to go to hell for (Wow!) criticizing him. Try that on for size.
…I just cannot understand why so many self-described Christian conservatives are so angry so constantly that they get mad at the suggestion there is more to life than politics.
Truth is, there is more to life than politics. And while you and I can find things that outrage us and they may be different things, to hell with you for being outraged that I’m not outraged about something that outrages you.
While you’re firing up your twitter account or blog to tell the world what a terrible person I am for disagreeing or not caring or not apologizing for some perceived slight or injury you think I’ve caused, in the actual real world that exists off the internet I’m going to go build a train with my 4 year old and fly it through the rings of Saturn before sitting down under the oak tree in my backyard to have a scoop of homemade ice cream with my 7 year old and play a game of catch.
You should try it.
What the fook?
“…in the actual real world that exists off the internet I’m going to go build a train with my 4 year old and fly it through the rings of Saturn…”
I was angry while reading this, b/c ol’ Erick and his lackeys at Red State revealed themselves to me several years ago (banned me for asking specific questions about why they were pushing so hard for a questionable candidate for governor in the state I live in), but I’ll admit this sentence made me do the old LOL. What the fook, indeed:
“To hell with you, my friends! I’m going to hang out in the real world…so I can build a toy train…AND FUCKING FLY IT THROUGH THE RINGS OF SATURN! BOOM!”
What a dolt.
At the end of the day, he’s just as big of a pussy as the liberals he allegedly opposes. Just as they are terrified of standing up to mooslims for fear of getting their heads whacked off, it’s easier for him to slander & jeer at his conservative base rather than personally fight with all of his good and dear gay, socialist, atheist, yet highly sophisticated, abortionist pals. I mean, the conversation’s just better, you know? It’ll be worth it when he emails them this post to show them how broad-minded he is, getting a thrill up his leg when they mention how they chuckled at the term “Jesusese”. So clever.
I remember your original post about him, and now he’s just buried himself in his own dreck. You describe him perfectly, both defensive and condescending, and it oozes out of his missive. If only he knew that people like you are doing exactly what he so earnestly claims to do — have a life outside of politics while thinking deeply about it.
While it’s been incredibly hard for me to deny friendships and family acquaintances based on these issues, as you’ve urged me to do, I see in him the anti-role model. Beliefs matter, these issues matter. Abortion matters, and despite the left making the gay marriage issue the civil rights analog of our time, it’s the true test of our civilization and country. One we’re failing. The reason we need to keep fighting.
Thanks for dissecting this media darling wannabe.
I think you mean they matter unless you make “fantastic” ice cream, in which case the only things that matter are the ones you want to matter when you say they matter.
Because Erick definitely needs more ice cream. Whoops. Was that a cheap shot?
He’s the guy who declared that “birthers” (people skeptical of Obama’s citizenship, or interested in other things that might be revealed on the original birth certificate) would not be tolerated as commenters on his blog. It’s his blog and he can set the rules; but in turn, I can choose to read blogs less fond of handing down diktats.