My post on the Jennifer Rubin profile at Politico was the top entry here through most of the day. Then this morning I saw Erick Erickson’s attack on Rubin at RealClearPolitics . I noticed the Jewish slur, where Erickson deploys the disgusting dual loyalty smear, alleging that Rubin’s ” best understood as ‘Likud’ rather than Republican or conservative .” Well Rubin pushed back, apparently. See Ben Smith, ” Rubin dismisses Erickson’s ‘anti-Semitic screed’ .” And Erickson’s apologized, ” An Anti-Semite? ” Erickson’s a clueless hack, as I’ve held all along. In fact, I don’t doubt his claim of ignorance at the apology, where he suggests that, ” A friend of mine explains to me that a Jewish-American might find it insulting because it suggests they put Israel ahead of the United States .” Hey, you think? Just one more example of how overrated this dude is. What a loser. Via Memeorandum and Weekly Standard . Added : From PolitiJim, ” I’m Sorry But Screw You Erick Erickson .”
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Jennifer Rubin Slams Erick Erickson’s ‘Anti-Semitic Screed’
I don’t read her that much, although I’m not hostile to Rubin as are some blog colleagues on the right. Dan Riehl and I occasionally go back and forth about Rubin on Twitter. See ” Rick Perry’s worst nightmare: Jennifer Rubin .” Rubin describes herself as a mainstream conservative, if not a a movement loyalist.“I don’t take a check-the-box, down-the-line view of conservatism. I think on foreign policy and economics I’m very much a Reagan conservative,” she said. But many conservative bloggers don’t view her as one of them. “I don’t have time to waste bytes on someone not in the conservative movement,” RedState’s Erick Erickson, who broke with Rubin over her support for the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, told POLITICO when asked about her in an email. Dan Riehl, another conservative blogger, described her as an “establishment Republican” and a “neocon” and said he suspected the Post uses her as a kind of foil, to define the rightward limit of the debate as relatively close to the center. “She’s kind of like [center-right New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat in lipstick, assuming he doesn’t wear any,” Riehl said. “I guess she couldn’t get a job with Romney so she stayed with The Washington Post.” (In fact, the Post has recently been courting other opinion writers on the right, in particular former Jesse Helms spokesman and Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, the leading defender of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the harsh interrogation he championed.) But Rubin, who has never shied from a fight, says that her role is different from conservative bloggers: She’s commenting on the right, not defending it. Lately I’m “commenting on the right” as well, since I haven’t settled on a pick for the nomination, or at least not yet, since Michele Bachmann’s numbers took a dive. More later …
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Jennifer Rubin Profiled at Politico
There’s an interesting story brewing after Mitt Romney’s campaign posted an attack advertisement on YouTube and then later removed it. The ad, which focuses on Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is characterized by Gawker’s Max Read as “personal and direct” — an accurate description to say the least. The short video doesn’t contain a stitch of anything that is favorable to Perry’s speaking abilities, intelligence or preparedness. Clearly, lambasting each of these areas was the Romney campaign’s goal, as the video concludes by asking, “Is he ready to lead? “HotAir.com’s Allah Pundit describes the clip as follows: It’s a symphony of Gump-ishness. Being a bad debater, while problematic in the general election, doesn’t disqualify you from being the nominee; being an idiot in general does. That’s the lesson. Offhand, I can’t remember ever seeing an ad like this that’s aimed not at showing that an opponent is stupid about a particular issue but that he’s stupid in general . While the ad has been taken down, CNN ran a version of it during one of its shows. In it, various clips of Perry’s less-than-stellar debate performances are knitted together along with news reports that lambast the governor: Read contends that it’s a bit odd that the Romney campaign would be focusing on Perry, considering that the Texas governor’s campaign is weak at the moment. However, Romney’s heated exchange with Perry at the Republican debate this week surrounding Romney’s hiring of illegal immigrants may have served as a catalyst for the ad. Erick Erickson shares his views on the making of the ad (his comments were posted before it was pulled by the Romney campaign): This is a necessary attack from Mitt Romney. Had he not pushed something out like this, the story would be that Mitt Romney got wounded last night. In several unscripted, unguarded moments he mentioned he failed to keep costs down in Massachusetts and was worried about illegals working for him because he was running for political office. But this doesn’t explain why the campaign would post, then remove the ad. ThinkProgress has been promoting the ad and its removal via social media: Allah Pundit does note that some ads are pulled temporarily, especially when they utilize video footage that may be called into question due to copyright. While he suggests that it’s possible the clip is being re-edited because of this, if it was, indeed, yanked, he says it is “a total embarrassment.”
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See the ‘Brutal’ Anti-Perry Attack Ad the Romney Campaign Mysteriously Pulled
Erick Erickson goes after Sarah Palin by attacking her supporters as “The Palin Fan Cult,” and tops it off with a few juicy digs against the Governor herself. To bolster his case he cites Ann Coulter’s comments with Laura Ingraham on Fox News. The Fox hotties are not my concern, as they’re supposed to be critiquing the candidates and pumping the ratings. Erick Erickson’s purportedly about building a movement. And it seems to me the last person you’d want to bash in that regard is Sarah Palin. Has she held out too long? Probably. I wish she would’ve announced early this year so she could’ve been amassing a war chest to rival Barack Obama’s expected $1 billion haul. And that’s not counting the possibility that Palin could lose the nomination despite being the ultimate conservative rock star. Fact is, Palin’s more in tune with the values of more conservatives than anyone else out there. Frankly, it doesn’t matter when she announces, except as a matter of strategy. No doubt the waiting is hard, but it’d still be worth it if she came out in November or December with a major policy speech declaring her candidacy. I’d be behind her in a second. I’ve said all along that as much as I like and support Michele Bachmann, I throw my support to Palin without batting an eye. (Now, thinking about it, a Palin/Bachmann dream team would put me over the top.) But at this point we don’t know, so faulting her for “teasing” only arms Palin’s divisions of enemies on the progressive left. And Erick Erickson should know better, but then again, he’s obviously not too bright. In any case, see William Jacobson, ” Erick Erickson: “moving on from Sarah Palin is like leaving Scientology ”, and Linkmaster Smith, ” Not Enough .” And more commentary at Memeorandum . Oh, and don’t forget Dan Riehl, ” Erick Erickson All Wee Weed Up Over Palin ,” and ” For All The Brave Whiners On Palin .”
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Erick Erickson: Dude Picks Fight With Sarah Palin Supporters, Loses Badly
**Written by Doug Powers No more calls please — we have a winner! Erick Erickson at Red State relays a story from somebody returning to the US from Afghanistan on a military charter not long ago that might prompt Zucker & Abrahams to sue the TSA for copyright infringement. Read it here and then come back. It doesn’t have as much to do with groped junk or the X-Posed Johnson 5000™ full body scanner as it does with good, old fashioned bureaucracy in action. Speaking of Zucker & Abrahams, the above story reminds me a little bit of this scene from Airplane II: **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
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Rifles vs. Nail Clippers: The Airport Security Story of the Week
