Erick Erickson:
Last year, the Atlantic interviewed me and I noted that “conservatives are in a constant state of hair-on-fire, yelling anger.” Throughout 2014’s election cycle, conservatives were in a constant state of pissed-offed-ness about everything. If you watched a movie with a prominent liberal, someone got upset. If you ate at a restaurant that was perceived as liberal, someone got upset.
There are absolutely, as I said then, real things to be upset about. There are things to be righteously angry about. But not everything.
It has seemed like a lot of that anger had turned to humor. We’re laughing at the left again. Many more conservatives are not angry that we’re all supposed to call Bruce Jenner a woman now. We’re laughing about it and mocking it. We’ve been laughing at the left.
But through it all, election year anger is growing again. This explosion today on twitter against Nikki Haley as an establishment hack is bat crap crazy.
I stood on the steps of the South Carolina Capitol Building with Nikki Haley and Sarah Palin in 2010. I was there to introduce Governor Palin, who was endorsing Nikki Haley when no one else would. That picture is Governor Palin and me as Nikki Haley speaks to the crowd. To this day, the very Republican Establishment you people are accusing her of sucking up to repeatedly spreads smears and lies about Nikki Haley that she sleeps around on her husband, is a terrible mother, and a pile of other crap because she keeps kicking their asses.
Haley has routinely beaten the Republican Establishment, a number of whom were perfectly happy to privately support her Democratic opponent in her 2014 re-election. The Republican good old boys in the South Carolina State Legislature routinely try to undermine her. Time and time again she has stood with tea party activists against the establishment.
So you disagree with Nikki Haley about yelling, tone, and anger. It seems to me today she’s been proven right. You’re willing to declare her an establishment hack for giving a response to the State of the Union address saying what she has been saying for six years. Yes. Six years ago, when Sarah Palin and I were supporting her, she was talking about smiling instead of scowling and speaking instead of yelling. Six years ago, Nikki Haley was talking about wooing people to our side by showing a better way and with honey, not vinegar.
This is nothing new for her and you really do not know her if you think she was fed a script and regurgitated it.
