This evening, the White House announced that President Obama is responding to the efforts of Republicans in Congress to “stall the nomination” of Dr. Donald Berwick, his nominee for Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) by using a recess appointment to install Berwick without Senate confirmation.

Wasting no time (and no doubt foreshadowing a wave of attacks), CNN contributor and RedState managing editor Erick Erickson quickly went on the attack, claiming that Berwick “openly wants to destroy the American medicare system.”

Erickson's evidence? Well, Berwick at one point stated that “Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.” Of course, health programs like Medicare and Medicaid actually are explicitly redistributional (and incredibly popular); they redistribute wealth from those who can afford health care to those who can't.

Moreover, even conservative commentator Laura Ingraham has acknowledged that Berwick's comment is “right,” telling Bill O'Reilly, “you and I are both in favor of there being a safety net where people don't go untreated, where people who need help get help. Obviously to pay for those people, it's obviously going to involve taxes and taxes come from people who make a living and make income.”

Erickson also criticizes Berwick for having “declared the United States should be more like Britain, where some people die waiting in line for medical treatment.” As opposed, I suppose, to the tens of thousands who die every year in the U.S. because they lack health insurance.

Erickson doesn't limit his deceitful smears to Berwick; in setting up his attack, Erickson pushes a long-debunked smear of conservative bête noire Kevin Jennings.

Erickson writes:

Barack Obama named Kevin Jennings the “safe schools czar” bypassing congressional action. Jennings, who openly bragged about encouraging an underage boy to engage in a sexual relationship with a man who solicited the boy in a bus station bathroom, could never have been confirmed.

Pretty much none of that is accurate.

Jennings is not a czar; his actual title is “Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools, US Department of Education.” Erickson paints the fact that Jennings wasn't confirmed by the Senate as some sort of conspiracy to put a radical in place, but in reality, none of the assistant deputy secretary positions in the Department of Education are Senate-confirmable -- they simply aren't important enough jobs to warrant that. The office Jennings heads was previously held by Bush administration appointees Eric G. Andell and Deborah A. Price. They weren't confirmed by the Senate either.

Erickson's attack on Jennings consists of long-debunked falsehoods based on Jennings' past statements about advice he gave to a student who told him about his relationship with an older man when Jennings was a high school teacher in the late 1980s. The “underage boy” in question wasn't; as Media Matters (and Erickson employer CNN) have conclusively documented, he was above the legal age of consent at the time. Moreover, there is no evidence whatsoever that in any way suggests Jennings “encouraged” the student “to engage in a sexual relationship.”

Of course, none of this is particularly surprising, as Erickson is an anti-gay bigot who previously called Jennings a “proponent of statutory rape” and a “zealous advocate of NAMBLA” and said that the “full gay rights agenda” is one “where men and boys can have sexual relationships free of prudish moral people frowning.”