Influential conservative blogger endorses ‘sweet meteor of death’ in GOP primary

Influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson said he would endorse the “sweet meteor of death” over any of the current GOP candidates, but would back the party’s eventual nominee in the general election against President Obama.

In the run-up to his endorsement, Erickson, who writes for the political website Red State, said he wouldn’t follow former GOP candidate Herman Cain with a non-endorsement.

Earlier this month, Cain endorsed “the people.” But speaking Monday on his WSB radio show, Erickson did something similar, endorsing “a great fireball from the sky annihilating us all.”

Still, Erickson said he hoped Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich stayed in the race because they had the best chances of rallying the conservative base against Romney.

Erickson has been one of the leading critics of Romney from the right. Last November he wrote a post titled “Mitt Romney as the nominee: Conservatism dies, Barack Obama wins.”

“Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee,” he wrote at the time. “And his general election campaign will be an utter disaster for conservatives as he takes the GOP down with him and burns up what it means to be a conservative in the process.”

As a result, many speculated that Erickson would throw his weight behind either Santorum or Gingrich, which would have given a significant boost to either campaign entering a week filled with lower-profile primaries and caucuses.

But Erickson has been highly critical of all the remaining candidates, saying the only reason Romney was seen as the eventual nominee was because “the other candidates, right now, are a pretty pathetic lot.”

Erickson has at various times said Ron Paul should be excluded based on the controversial newsletters that bear his name, called Santorum a “big-government conservative” and said it would be “insanity” to nominate Gingrich, who in the past has supported the individual mandate.

Speaking Monday, Erickson called for a “pox on all their houses.”

“I doubt any of them can beat Barack Obama unless the economy gets worse, and I don’t want to be in a position of rooting for a bad economy,” he said.

Erickson said he’s hoping for a brokered convention, where some other candidate might emerge in a last-ditch effort to derail the Romney campaign.

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