The Ulterior Motive behind Red State's Erick Erickson's Attacks against Santorum

Suddenly, conservative Red State bloigger Erick Erickson is panicked and has started working overtime getting his attack machine rowing at ramming speed to attack the good ship Santorum. He has twittered and bloggered against the Senator, conjuring all his might and intellect to depict Santorum as being the fifth term of FDR, the second term of LBJ, and curtains-for-sure of a once great republic.

Erickson overplays his hand, to say the least, and this is obvious to anyone who knows anything about Santorum. People who exaggerate their criticisms to such a degree should never be taken seriously. But in Erickson's case, there is a motive, one which requires him not only to warn against a putative perfidious side to Santorum, but one which makes him desperate to make sure that Santorum goes down in flames. Here's his motive....

Week after week after week over these last few months, Erickson has dismissed Santorum as a non-factor in the race. At some point, Erickson even wrote that he would no longer report on Santorum because of his irrelevancy; and indeed, Erickson dropped him altogether for a few weeks. But Santorum refused to quit, and Erickson picked him back up only to say that there was no way that Santorum would influence the race in any way.

Now that Santorum is polling so well in Iowa, Erickson is suddenly faced with an embarrassing loss of credibility. The world is about to see how profoundly mistaken Erickson has been. A mistake of such magnitude would be akin to predicting that Walter Mondale would defeat Reagan in 1984. Hence, Erickson is desperate to do anything and everything he possibly can to sink the Santorum campaign in a self-serving effort to save his own prognosticating derriere. Erickson's flaming of Santorum is not an effort to save the American republic, but an effort to rescue his own credibility.

This is the motive behind Erickson's attacks on Santorum. For an assessment of Erickson's case against Santorum, go here: http://theo-politico.blogspot.com/2012/01/in-effort-to-save-his-own.html