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Not a great day in the IP household, at least initially. The missus had to swing for the fences with two out in the ninth of game seven of her career. But she poled the spitball she was thrown into the upper deck. As I hoped she would without being certain. Life, you know, is not always fair.

Tired me out waiting, I don’t mind telling you. Wanted to give this particular bit of frippery a pass. B-u-u-u-t, I couldn’t. Don’t ask me why. Something about the Brizoni exchange. Something about pomposity and media ambition disguised as virtue. Even something about the difference between morality and mere posturing. Yes, Brizoni, some vocal Christians are as empty as you think we all are.

Erick Erickson, whom I’ve written about before (And before that, too), is playing the Christian card, as if he owns the whole deck. He has a post today that I just can’t let go without comment. He begins by damning his own commenters.

Were I to recreate this site, I think it would have no comments section. Disqus is just horrible. I do not recommend it to anyone. And it just helps further what I see on so much social media these days. As much as the internet can bring people together of like mind, it also can help shrill minorities of people think their views are more mainstream than they are. That then emboldens them further.

Why? Because some conservatives violate his personal definition of Christianity. He specifies:

To start, Christian conservatives were roundly assailed by other conservatives for daring to provide aid and comfort to children whose parents had shipped them across the border. Some could not distinguish between giving a child a teddy bear and supporting Mexican drug cartels. It was all one or all the other. In fact, many Christians, myself included, want expedited deportations and a secure border. But we also want to make sure the children, some victims of human trafficking, were taken care of, fed, and comforted.

But to some on the right, that is aiding law breakers. The anger and hysteria directed at conservatives engaged in private charity had all the makings of a leftist police state making us care about how we choose to spend our own money.

The second was bringing Dr. Brantly and his co-worker back to the United States. The number of angry calls into my radio program from well meaning conservatives, comments across social media, opinion columns, agreement thereto, etc. really boggled my mind. Here are two Americans risking their lives to help others and we are supposed to turn our back on them, leave them there, or criticize their decision to go in the first place? That’s not the America I know or love. The level of outright anger, fear, and bitterness over the decision to take care of American citizens and the lack of knowledge and understanding that formed the foundation for the anger, fear, and bitterness really left me wondering what is going on.

The last is the present situation in Ferguson, MO. The rush to win a fight and lay blame instead of mourning a loss and praying for a situation just leaves me perplexed. The rush to “change the narrative” with bad facts to replace bad facts by some folks who keep the ichthys [sic] on their car unsettles me.

The paragraph that set up this listing of grievances is priceless.

In the past several months there have been three incidents that have solidified for me that my faith and my politics are starting to collide. While I am a firm believer in the idea of a conservative populism, I see a dangerous trend within the mix of unfortunate shrillness and hostility. That trend is playing out in the comments here at RedState and on social media.

Awww. All of his items of offense are presumptuous, misleading, or just plain rock headed.

To deal with his first outrage, I’ll quote someone else, a commenter at Hotair, who responded to Erickson’s claim that it’s unchristian to think teddy bears are not a solution.

Because we surmise that this “let’s help these kids” will eventually turn into saying we should grant them amnesty. We’ve been down the road before. It starts with a call to compassion for their current well being, then after we are softened up on that front, a call for amnesty of “just these kids” and then that expands, and expands again, until every illegal is amnestied. We are not as stupid as you think we are Erik.

And, we also realize that sometimes being nice does more harm in the long run. The more compassion we show to those who make it here illegally, the more that will likely come illegally.

I have not been at RedState for a long while – because Redstate was always more of a republican site than a conservative site – but in some of my last forays there – during the Bush push for amnesty – the writers there were all pro amnesty, and they were vicious in calling anyone against amnesty racist, etc. Moe Lane was particularly eager to call everyone who disagreed with him about amnesty a racist.

So, this argument by Erickson is disingenuous. It is an attempt to use “faith” to push his politics…

I’m not saying we should always be nasty, or always angry, or always take the low road. But, this argument that we must never be any of those things is absurd. And note, these people don’t pull this argument out when conservatives are mean or angry about other things – only when it is about something where they disagree – immigration.

I’ll handle the other two papal denunciations myself.

Erickson is also offended, like many, about Coulter’s takedown of the sainted Ebola doctor who was just released from hospital yesterday. Couple points. Coulter is always Coulter, more than half serious and more than half satirical. The extra is the mileage she gets from long blonde hair and very short skirts. She was making, despite the sarcasm, an interesting point.

Whatever good Dr. Kent Brantly did in Liberia has now been overwhelmed by the more than $2 million already paid by the Christian charities Samaritan’s Purse and SIM USA just to fly him and his nurse home in separate Gulfstream jets, specially equipped with medical tents, and to care for them at one of America’s premier hospitals.

Yesterday he thanked God for his salvation. Okay. But the god that saved him strikes me more as a classical “deus ex machina” than the savior of his faith. An American jet plane descended into Africa to save an American doctor and nurse and whisk them to safety back in the land of their origin, at great expense and with miraculous results. Where else have we heard of people recovering from Ebola?

Maybe that’s not what he intended. But we never had the headline, “Saintly doctor refuses to be jetted back to America for space age treatment of deadliest virus in the world.”

Not judging him. I’m sure he’s a good man. But Father Damien he ain’t. At least not yet. Talk to me in a few months when he does or doesn’t have a million dollar book contract. Until then he’s the luckiest, most privileged unselfish altruist on earth.

And, yeah, Erick is upset about the Jefferson fiasco too. Because Christians have no right to be ticked off about looting and lynch mentality as a substitute for the rule of law.

For his information, National Review has become the dullest literate publication in the nation during the last week, because despite countless articles by multiple outstanding opinion writers, the refrain has been numbingly the same: We don’t know what happened, we can’t judge facts we don’t have, and all we can do is encourage everyone to reserve judgment. And btw we hate looting and rushes to judgment. How unChristian can you get?

Erickson. Product of a new force in political culture. Naked ambition clothed in traditional virtue. No, he doesn’t hate America. He’s just willing to be a kind of new Cromwell, imposing his own righteousness on the rest of us in the name of what he presumes we were always supposed to believe in.

Sad thing is, I think Glenn Beck is way way ahead of him in this particular race.

Even farther ahead are most of the rest of us. Who regard them as transparently ambitious fools. A fairly pitiful minority. Even conservative progressivism has no legs. It’s just another dead, and frightfully deadening, end.

But I ‘ve been wrong before. God knows.