HOW TO RELAX YOUR LIBERAL-MEDIA FRIENDS IN INTERVIEWS

Half a century ago, Lenny Bruce released a comedy album with a track called "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties" -- the point of which was that laboring to say nice things about black people is clearly not the way to accomplish this task:



Apparently, though, if you're right-wing and you want to relax (non-African-American) New York Times reporters in interviews, you try the same tactic (and do it much less ineptly). At least that's what Erick Erickson, the hate-spewing RedState blogger turned CNN commentator, did for a story by Shaila Dewan of the Times -- apropos of nothing, he just began to declare what an excellent friend of the black community he is.

And it appears Dewan fell for it:

Over coffee, Mr. Erickson, 34, hardly comes across as a screamer. He is more preoccupied with finding a baby sitter for his two small children because his wife, Christy, is sick.

One of the first topics he brings up is a nearby middle-class black neighborhood that was destroyed when an Interstate highway was routed through it because, Mr. Erickson said, "white people were in charge."

Mr. Erickson, who is the son of an oil company production foreman and spent much of his childhood in Dubai, still seems slightly amazed by the racial conflict that permeates Southern cities like Macon, which has been his home since he attended a small college here.

"I think sometimes there are people on my side who don't treat the racial issues with the respect they should because they see them being overblown or blown out of proportion," he said.

Yeah, right -- this just so happened to be on his mind when he met a reporter from the lib/commie/multiculti New York Times. He wasn't cynically trying to disarm her with his surprising sensitivity on matters racial -- what he said just came out that way! There was nothing calculated about it!

(Or perhaps Erickson met Ms. Dewan, who appears to trace her part of ancestry to somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, and assumed she was African-American.)

Maybe a different pop-culture reference is more appropriate -- in a way, Erickson is being a political Eddie Haskell here. And, it seems, a successful one.

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There's also this in Dewan's profile:

Mr. Erickson said he had become less personal in his attacks on politicians, but not because of the controversy over his more colorful comments. Instead, he gave credit to his term on the City Council, where he has fought a shrinking budget and a proliferation of massage parlors.

Oh, really? Erickson was elected to the city council of Macon, Georgia, in 2007. He called David Souter a "goat fucking child molester" in April 2009. He wrote, about Barack Obama's Nobel, "I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it," in October 2009. He responded to pro-choice anger at Tim Tebow's Super Bowl ad with "Ugly feminists return to their kitchens" and "That's what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain" in February of this year. Go here if you want to do the math on some of his other pronouncements.