Fox News Channel pundits Greta Van Susteren and Erick Erickson have gone to war over Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D) and Erickson’s characterization of Davis as “Abortion Barbie.” According to Talking Points Memo, a blog post by Van Susteren calling Erickson a “jerk” goaded Erickson into publishing a gruesome anti-choice rant that described scenes more suited to an abattoir or an installment of the “Saw” movie franchise than a women’s clinic.

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“Wendy Davis has staked her career on the right to chop a child to bits, no matter how viable the child is,” Erickson wrote on Monday night at his blog Red State.

Rather than the bullying “jerk” portrayed by Van Susteren, Erickson perceives himself as a courageous truth-teller, saying, “I have helped define Wendy Davis by a moniker that sticks, describes, and makes her the butt of jokes, while drawing out the shrill hysterics of her supporters.”

The erstwhile CNN pundit was responding to a Monday blog post by Van Susteren at her GretaWire website in which she called out Erickson for lobbing sexist insults at Davis via Twitter.

In the post, Van Susteren derided Erickson and Davis’ other attackers as “creeps who take cheap shots because they are too ignorant and small to engage in an important discussion.”

“I don’t care how much you disagree or agree with Texas’ Wendy Davis, you have to agree that this guy, Erick Erickson, is a real jerk and is really lousy at being a spokesperson for his views,” she said.

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Further, she asked what kind of example he is setting for his own daughter, writing, “I see he tweets about his daughter. When I read the above tweet I thought, I wonder how proud his daughter would be of him if she knew that he tweeted insults about women. It is one thing to disagree…but he tweets insults.”

Erickson responded by posting “A Very Sincere Thank You” to Van Susteren Monday night.

“Wendy Davis believes it is perfectly acceptable to crack open a child’s skull, inject her cranium with saline, vacuum out her brains, then tear her limb from limb unstitching her from her mother’s womb even though a minute, an hour, a day, a week, or a month later she could survive outside the womb,” he insisted, engaging in a common anti-choice trope of equating any fertilized egg — even a ten-day-old blastocyst — to a fully viable fetus.

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“Wendy Davis has staked her career on the right to chop a child to bits, no matter how viable the child is,” he wrote, referring to Davis’ 13-hour filibuster against a draconian Texas anti-choice law that would make abortion illegal de facto by closing the bulk of the state’s clinics.

The act of defiance against the Texas GOP’s hegemony over the state drew thousands of supporters to the state capitol in Austin and has galvanized Texas Democrats. Davis announced in 2013 that she intends to run for governor, a move that has some in the state recalling the leadership of former Gov. Ann Davis (D) and others frantically hurling insults and distortions in an effort to stop Davis’ momentum.

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“Wendy Davis is a one issue wonder heralded by the press because she is a high priestess of the secular religion’s sacred sacrament — slaughtering children on the altar of Moloch. That Greta Van Susteren is offended by me, thinks me creepy and a jerk, and thinks I should not be listened to is of no harm or consequence to me,” he wrote.

Now, apparently, Republicans are not only calling Davis a “coke whore,” an unfit mother and a coldly ambitious huntress, Erickson is calling her a baby-sacrificing witch.

Van Susteren and fellow Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly have singled out Erickson in the past for the viciousness of his attacks on women.

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Erickson, a Macon, Georgia resident and longtime far-right agitator has been given to rhetorical extremes in the past. He famously called Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat-f*cking child molester.”

In 2009, he called Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) a eunuch and an infectious “cancer” on the GOP. He called on fellow conservatives to “collectively rip off his jaw and shovel the crap back down his throat that he’s been serving us.”

[image of Erick Erickson via Gage Skidmore’s Flickr photostream, Creative Commons licensed]