Ed Henry should quit while CNN is behind
March 17, 2010 11:29 am ET by Eric Boehlert
This is what happens when you make poor hiring choices -- you force your employers to defend the mistakes, which only makes more people look bad. Yesterday, it was CNN's Ed Henry's turn.
Responding to the criticism that greeted the news that CNN had hired right-wing hate blogger Erick Erickson to be a regular contributor, a tweet on Henry's account read:
For those Tweeting CNN shouldn't have hired @ewerickson as a contributor, seriously do you think a network should NOT have diverse voices
Not to put to put too fine a point on it, but this is just painfully dumb. Henry actually claimed that liberals were upset because they don't want CNN to hire any conservatives; that CNN hired somebody who they will disagree with politically? This is pointless because basically nobody on the Left was making that argument. In fact, they were explicitly saying it was fine for CNN to hire conservatives.
But at least we know Ed Henry can build straw men.
But then it got worse with this tweet:
@buffalo_girl who is the equivalent to Eric Erickson on the left appearing on CNN? Have you seen Begala, Carville ...
Yep, Henry used the "e" word" (equivalent) when discussing Erickson alongside Paul Begala and James Carville. Apparently In Henry's eyes, Erickson and Begala/Carville are the same. And this is where CNN, by making a foolish hiring decision, begins to lose even more credibility; by having staffers like Henry run around and suggest a right-wing hate blogger is just like top-notch Democratic thinkers.
Keep in mind that Begala/Carville, by getting Bill Clinton elected, helped resurrect the Democratic Party, and then counseled a sitting president. Erickson, by comparison, is a city councilman who writes hate dispatches on his blog, like when he denounced a retiring Supreme Court Justice as a "goat fucking child molester."
But in the eyes of Henry, or at least according to his corporate spin, Begala and Carville are just like Erickson. They're equals.


















There seem now to be three default Faux Con errors:
1) The strawman
2) Ad hominem attacks
3) False equivalence
It's a good thing for the Faux Cons that these logical fallacies aren't felonies, what with the 'three strikes' law and everything. It's also a bit sad that there is any significant portion of the American people who can still be fooled by such transparent errors of logic. I suppose that's why the Republicans want to cut education funding. They're hoping to fool all of the people all of the time.
And CNN has has been circling the drain since Ted Turner sold it.
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I would note that Bill Clinton and those two gentlemen are DLC Democrats...which is not "The Left" at all. (In spite of all the screeching and howling from the always_working_the_Overton_window right.)
If you were to take an equivalent of Erickson from the other side of the spectrum, it would be someone like Digby. (And I mean equivalent just in terms of distance from the center...Digby is a far better writer and thinker than Erickson.)
Who at CNN is like Digby? I can't think of anyone.
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No, not like Digby. Digby's content doen't come close to being as whacked out Erickson's.
For the equivalent of Erickson's type of misogyny and support of sociopathic economic policies, you'd need one of those "all men re rapist" types who also spends a lot of time talking about all the capitalist pigs who should be lined up against a wall and shot come der revolution.
I'm sure there must be someone like that who has a blog.
Alternatively, you can establish that, far from being a "citizen journalist" of the sort people like Digby, Atrios, and myself have always been, Erickson is, like Carville and Begala, part of the paid party campaign apparatus - only crazier - and that the paid party hacks are the only people who get to have opinions on CNN, regardless of actual content.
Bra. Vo. *clap clap*
when I claim to know why you do what you do
Puh-LEAZE.
Has Erickson ever done anything successful outside of Redstate? You know, something that *didn't* end up failing and just fizzling out? I can't think of anything.
Just one example: do any of you even remember Operation Leper? No, of course you don't. That was one of Erickson's projects, after all.