If you were fortunate enough to miss Erick Erickson's post-shutdown meltdown disguised in a frenzy of reinvigorated fight, then your luck just ran out. I'm here to give you some choice quotes, each of them carefully stylized in the conspicuous absence of any thought whatsoever. We're talking classic Erickson here, full of vim, vigor and vapidity, a textbook study in the human perils of animalistic passion; a mass of incoherence set against the disordered backdrop of mass hysteria, induced by said incoherence.
The thrust of "Advancing, Ever Advancing" is, as you might guess, self-celebratory rallying in the face of wholesale defeat. Yet the title alone might fail to drive this point home to the dispirited throngs, so Erickson peppers the content with Goebbelsesque repetition:
[W]e must advance ... Now conservatives can keep advancing ... Conservatives must advance--ever advancing against the Republicans who have folded in the fight against Obamacare ... 2014 must now be about advancing, ever advancing, even through the ranks of the GOP to have the fights that must be had.
Got it? Good. But don't get too comfortable. For you've now the challenge of resolving an immense contradiction in Erickson's screed which Erickson himself seems to assume is too easily resolvable to bother with on our behalf. On the one hand he writes:
Men like Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and others have preached a great sermon against Obamacare, but now conservatives who supported them see that these men have refused to actually practice what they’ve been preaching ...
but on the other, discombobulating hand he observes:
Ted Cruz and Mike Lee may not have been able to strike a death blow to Obamacare today, but they ... have now made it less and less possible for Republicans to collaborate with Democrats to fix or stabilize Obamacare.
So the the wicked, poltroonish Establishment Republicans who "have refused to actually practice what they've been preaching" are in reality more likely now to practice what they've been preaching. Erickson just told his readers that. So his enduring complaint about the now-purified establishmentarians is ... what exactly?
Who the hell really knows. But he wants a fight, a big fight, a big, brawling confrontation, in which the rabble's victory is, according to Erickson, virtually guaranteed:
This fight ... will break apart the GOP. There will not necessarily be a new party from it, but there will be a fundamentally altered party of new faces fueled by a grassroots movement now able to connect with each other and independent from Wall Street and K Street funders.
And therein lies the self-unobserved key in Erickson's doom: His demographically diminishing masses shall "connect with each other"--without anywhere, electorally, to go.
Of course Erickson doesn't really mind. He's making a mint on bamboozling the fools.