Before the upcoming coroner’s report disillusions any remaining political innocents, the NYTimes decides to rush-post (in the “Fashion & Style” section) its Breitbart hagiography:
… ANDREW BREITBART jacked into the Web early and never unplugged. As someone who worked on the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post in the early days and was busy building his own mini-empire of conservative opinion and infotainment at Breitbart.com, he understood in a fundamental way how discourse could be profoundly shaped by the pixels generated far outside the mainstream media he held in such low regard.
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Mr. Breitbart, as much as anyone, turned the Web into an assault rifle, helping to bring down Acorn, a community organizing group, with the strategic release of undercover videos made by James OâKeefe, a conservative activist; forcing Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official, out of her job with a misleadingly edited clip of a speech; and flushing out Representive Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, when he tried to lie about lewd pictures he had sent via Twitter.
__
Less watchdog than pit bull (and one who, without the technology of the 21st century, might have been just one more angry man shouting from a street corner), Mr. Breitbart altered the rules of civil discourse…
I doubt “Lee Harvey Oswald with a website” qualifies as “alter[ing] the rules of civil discourse.”
Mr. Breitbart was a ubiquitous presence on and off the Web, though not one who ever managed to have significant business success there. His star rose along with the Tea Party, of which he was an early and frequent defender.
__
But he cut an odd figure for a conservative, holding forth with lectures on political theory that name-dropped Michel Foucault and other leftist thinkers. He could also be mordantly funny. (His Twitter avatar was an echo of the apocryphal Jesus imprint on a piece of toast.) Matt Labash, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, described him as âhalf right wing Yippie, half Andy Kaufman,â in his column after Mr. Breitbart died…
The bastard offspring of Abbie Hoffman and post-funny Saturday Night Live skits, plus, “memes”!
He was conversant in pop culture â the Cure and New Order were particular musical favorites â and thought nothing of wearing in-line skates, his longish hair trailing behind him, as he confronted protesters at a rally outside a conservative event hosted by David and Charles Koch in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2011. Once he was done berating the protesters, he took some of them to dinner at Applebeeâs…
The Eighties called, and they want their candy-colored parachute pants back. Have the investigating law enforcement authorities checked David Brooks’s alibi for the day Breitbart died?
Mr. Breitbart was activated as a conservative for good by the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, a process he believed was filled with politically motivated innuendo…
All of it from the conservative side: Remember “a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty”? Not to mention “high-tech lynching”. Sure, it was undignified and dishonest, but the Bad Guys won! And #WINNING is what’s important!
âI think that he took the guidelines and principles of talk radio, where you could say almost anything and get away with it, and applied it to the Internet,â said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a liberal research center on the media, who battled constantly with Mr. Breitbart.
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Mr. Breitbart specialized in teasing a small ember of a story, whether it was an inconsistency or a gaffe, and dumping gasoline on it until it blew up â sometimes on him, sometimes on others. âIf you do a good enough job, you can force them to make a mistake,â he wrote in his book. âWhen they do, you must be ready to exploit it.â…
Once you’ve abadoned the concept of ‘dignity’, there’s always a market for character assassination. If only Breitbart had been willing, like his role model Limbaugh, to retreat behind the “I’m only an entertainer” defense…
Working with Mr. OâKeefe, he also used heavily edited video clips to savage Ms. Sherrod, an obscure official at the Agriculture Department, by giving the appearance that she had made racially motivated financing decisions, when actually she had done the opposite.
__
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in 2011, Mr. Breitbart was served papers for a lawsuit alleging that he had recklessly destroyed her reputation. A representative for Ms. Sherrod said settlement negotiations were continuing despite Mr. Breitbartâs death…
Good for Shirley Sherrod, and I hope every dime the surviving Big Nothingburger enterprises might make from far-right-wing sugar daddies and deluded basement dwellers goes straight to her.
Following his memorial, his colleagues and friends gathered in a house behind the Capitol â Mr. Breitbart had rented a huge, ornate house he called âthe Embassyâ that served as both salon and a Washington base for his media company â to tell stories and reminisce. A family friend remembered watching Andrew, at age 2, bang his head on a concrete floor when he did not get his way, foretelling a life of stubborn conflict…
The tumult and the shouting dies / The Captains and the Kings depart… Sorry, NYTimes: Breitbart was the rainbow-tinted toxic froth decorating the sewage output of the dying “conservative” dream. To quote an Alternet review of Breitbart’s 2011 meme-oir:
… As political and media analysis, Righteous Indignation is thin gruel even by Conservative Book Club standards. Its prose is constructed of granite-slab clichĂ©s, mortared with the thin bile and rabid drool of a man whose two authorial modes are sycophant (he calls Matt Drudge and Roger Ailes âvisionariesâ by page four) and spoiled, hyperactive child (he tells his lawyer after seeing the ACORN videos, âI want it. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want itâ).
__
As a window into the mind and soul of an ascendant and uniquely shameless force on the right, however, Righteous Indignation fascinates, and demands at least a fraction of the attention demanded by its man-child author. What emerges in these pages is a self-portrait of the post-intellectual rightwing activist-provocateur as overgrown Hollywood brat, so debilitated by ADHD he must take to an airplane to escape the Internet and find the peace of mind to construct a single complete English sentence.
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âThis book,â writes Breitbart, âmarks the first time since 2004 that Iâve felt compelled to communicate a set of ideas that couldnât be related on Twitter or Facebook, on a blog, in a chat room, with AOL Instant Messenger, via Skype, or on Blog Talk Radio.â
__
Yes, we can tell.
dmsilev
Insert salad bar joke here.
Villago Delenda Est
One might as well exclaim how Julius Streicher was a man ahead of its times.
Tne NYT is absolutely shameless. Tumbrels for the lot (less Kthug, of course, who doesn’t count).
russell
The child is father to the man.
Mickey
The chalk outline reportedly looked like jebus on a grilled cheese sandwitch and the pavement appeared to weep blood red tears.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@russell: We had a guy do that when I was in bootcamp. They came in the middle of the night and took him away, probably to get counseling and a discharge. Someone should have done the same to Andrew.
brettvk
How I wish the NYT allowed reader comments on that article.
rda909
@dmsilev: Those protesters Blightfart ate with at Applefails were from the Westboro Baptist Church, I’m guessing…
TTT
He was a hate-crazed smear merchant whose every single work product was tainted by lies, except for those that were uninterrupted lies from start to finish.
I’m not happy he’s dead – I’m sad he ever lived.
LT
Did you just diss Abbie Hoffmann?
And:
That person needs a dictionary. Twice.
Egg Berry
I just lost any fucking respect I ever had for David Carr.
samara morgan
when the autopsy comes out, it will be revealed that he died of vascular dementia.
sic semper rage-ravers everywhere.
He will be remembered for screaming STOP RAPING at the OWS protestors, not for O’Queefe’s slimy videos.
danielx
How about half Joseph Goebbels and half poodle?
Citizen_X
I suppose that, to our eternally-mired-in-the-sixties punditariat, that sounds contemporary. But that stuff is in my record collection, too.
Hint: I said records.
Amir Khalid
Oh good. We were just mocking the bit about Breitbart’s “ruddily handsome Celtic features” in DougJ’s thread, but I knew we weren’t done yet.
FlipYrWhig
@russell: That explains a lot, don’t it?
Egg Berry
@Citizen_X: Yeah, if he was really conversant, Joy Division would have been a fave.
k488
Thanks for the Kipling quotation. I’ve thought of that poem many times over the past few years. I have my choir sing it (it has been used as the text of a hymn) before every election week for the past four years.
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen_X: I’m 40, and I had a student specifically thank me for introducing her to a band she had never heard of. Depeche Mode. Sad to say, that’s not pop culture anymore.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
The planet is better off now.
Suffern ACE
He’s was not worth a post of this length when he was alive. He’s worth even less dead. Let us not speak his name again, and instead spit on the ground when someone mentions his name, like cultures with actual smart people do.
Xecky Gilchrist
I have to say that the dead tree media are becoming more subtle in their “We don’t understand the Internet, we hates it and we wants it dead” screeds.
Jennifer
Where’s the toxicology report?
eemom
@TTT:
steal-worthy.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@Jennifer:
I’m trying to decide what pic to use on the Nose Candy Andy shirts I’ll be printing up.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, but how many people actually know who Streicher was?
lamh35
So I was catching up on Person of Interest on CBS, and I’m never using my credit/bank/debit card to pay for anymore meals at restaurants where my card is gonna be taken from the table and swiped! The ep I watched involved identity theft and the waitress had some type of card scanner attached to her hip that she used to scan the customer’s credit card as she was taking it away to pay for the bill!!!! I’m going to be only using cash from now on if I can help it!
Iâve come to really like Person Of Intrest, even though Jim Caviziel is a RW extreme religious nut there is a reason why he was willing to play Jesus for Mel Gibson. You should check out his wikipedia page.
Jamey
@LT: Not only that, but Breitbart stole that gag from Bill Maher.
gocart mozart
Let us all congratulate Andrew for approaching his second consecutive month of sobriety.
Lojasmo
@Egg Berry:
Love and rockets, also, too.
Sally Rakowski
Nothing made him happier than irrational liberal contempt.
Nothing would’ve made him happier than knowing months after he died, that liberals still couldn’t contain their contempt for him.
It’s like he still lives.
Joseph Nobles
[email protected]lamh35: I really like PoI for thbat very reason. The source program for the SS# they use is still a fiction, but it’s the kind of thing governments are working on. And it really does deal with how much we allow surveillance of ourselves. The admission that Fitch invented Facebook recently was priceless!
LT
@Jamey: Really? Perfect.
dlnelson
The republicans are forever boxing ghosts, it is the same story over and over. Rinse repeat and repeat. debn
Citizen_X
Here is, I think, one of my favorite Breitbart moments: when he bravely interrupts his cocktail hour to flip off antiwar protestors who, it turns out, were protesting child-soldier slavery in Africa. Oops.
And the picture is gold: Breitbart drinking at a bar, in public, wearing a fucking Snuggy.
lamh35
@Joseph Nobles: Yep the technology they use to conduct surveillance if any of them are real are really scary to think how easy it is for people to steal you information by just bumping into you in the street!
Joe Bauers
He did not “change the rules of civil discourse”. He was an asshole who ignored the rules of civil discourse. There’s a difference.
Chyron HR
And some of them, he skinned and ate. A true centrist!
El Cid
Asshole race-baiting lying fraudulent propagandist hack for the meanest of the pig-people, personally targeting and harming anyone who happened to embody whatever race-baiting or sexism-baiting stereotype he wanted to attack.
Fuck Andrew Breitbart. There is no fucking reason to honor his memory in any way whatsoever.
I’m glad he’s gone from the public stage. It’s unfortunate that it took his death to remove him, but his absence (for whatever reason) is a net good for humankind.
suzanne
@Citizen_X:
No shit. I mean, yay, New Order’s last album was seven years ago, and it was good, but considering that their major creative output was about twenty years ago, I certainly wouldn’t be citing admiration of them as anything contemporary on its face. I mean, they were formed in the Carter Admistration, FFS.
Perhaps this is mean, but I have a feeling that Breitbart’s demise will end up being of the two-wetsuits-and-a-dildo variety. And that doesn’t give me a sad.
El Cid
@Joe Bauers: Yeah, same way with the “Karl Rove is a genius” bullshit, as if fucking lying and stealing and smearing is some sort of difficult thing to think of. “Oh my gosh, no one’s ever thought of creating malicious rumors about their political opponent! What a genius rebel!”
Mike in NC
So where exactly did they bury this scumbag asshole? Just in case I’m on the road sometime and feel a full bladder in need of relief.
suzanne
@Amir Khalid: There’s apparently an entire strain of people who find not showering regularly hopelessly attractive. These people are wrong. As such, Andrew Breitbart was not attractive in any sense of the word.
Just Some Fuckhead
I hope Acorn digs him up and pimps his corpse out to necrophiles.
Keith
So when does the coroner’s report come out, anyway? I’ve got a small bet with someone over the presence of cocaine and am waiting to collect.
Just Some Fuckhead
@suzanne:
They’re called Swedes.
danielx
@efgoldman:
Nope. If I could think of a more infamous propagandist, I’d have used that comparison. Breitbart was a scumbag who liked nothing better than ruining people to further his political ends, and if his opponents ended up dead it would have suited him even better. I hope nothing ever grows on his grave because of the number of people who piss on it.
danielx
@suzanne:
Having been in a state park gift store (not by choice) when a bunch of them came in, I can safely say that Mennonites fall into the same category. Think the Steelers offensive line at the end of the third quarter crossed with a bunch of goats.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
“And when he died, all he left us was alone, lone, lone, lone yeah….”
Mike G
@Citizen_X:
He knew about bands that were popular when he was a teenager in the 80s, wow. I guess among young fogey Repukes this passes as an exceptional level of popular cultural knowledge, given that they are still catching up with Mantovani and Lawrence Welk.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@Mike in NC: @Just Some Fuckhead:
combine these two in the spirit of peace harmony and all that stuff. find brietbart’s grave and plant acorns. heck put acorns on his grave once a day, week, whenever….
Spaghetti Lee
The postmortem fluffing this guy’s gotten is amazing. Did all these people just get their accounts of him secondhand from his own employees? How could anyone with a cursory knowledge of Breitbart’s life and work think he’s anything other than an asshole?
SoINeedAName48
Mom always taught me to only speak good of the dead.
Good … he’s dead.
Jamey
@LT: The lobby card for the movie, “Religulous.” http://psychedelicadventure.blogspot.com/2010/09/bill-maher-religulous-documentary-film.html
Jamey
@El Cid: I will gladly lavish praise on Rover if it would hasten his demise.
kay
Now no one will ever unravel the mysteries of the Pigford Settlement, a “controversy” he invented solely to race-bait.
Remember that? He had to tie himself up in knots by the end there. It was complete gibberish, more and more convoluted and paranoid.
He wasn’t attacking black farmers who had been ripped off by the federal loan program. No sir! He was DEFENDING the honest black farmers from those other, thieving, lying black farmers.
Just pathetic.
honus
Liking The Cure and New Order makes him “conversant with pop culture?” And other than his twitter avatar, what else did he ever do, say or write that was “mordantly funny?”
Judging from this, if O’Keefe gets hit by a truck tomorrow, they’ll be comparing him to A J Leibling.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-PĂzsmĆgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
What really floors me about Breitbart is how truly sad and pitiful he was.
I think it’s easy to forget that, but it’s true. He was a 43 year old guy who spent his life being professionally offended by people who were trying to make life just a little better for hte poorest and weakest among us. And he fought against these people by screaming at them, lying about them and fobbing off faked videos by which he stole their livelihoods and good names.
The guy was a turd, but it really is hard not to look at a life wasted that badly and not feel some kind of pity for the guy. No wonder he was always so pissed off. No wonder he was always getting drunk or high to try to forget, if only for a while, the inescapable dystopian hellscape of his own soul. And not for nothing, but that kind of life takes a toll; I’m Breitbart’s age, but he looked 15 years older than I do.
In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood watches a pointless Civil War battle over a meaningless bridge and says, “I’ve never seen so many me wasted so badly.” I look at Breitbart’s life, such as it was, and I say, “I’ve never seen one man’s life wasted so badly.”
Suffern ACE
@kay: Yep. Instead of talking about his sorry life, we could be undoing the shit he was spewing.
Bennett
Seeing as he’s been deceased for 8 weeks, it’s clear the autopsy toxicology is being withheld. If there were any reporters left, one of them might inquire about this. Nothing’s been said one way or the other. Can it legally be withheld? What’s the Coroner say? Usually a determined reporter can get ahold of things like this….
El Cid
You know what I think we need to do?
I think we need to have a fund to recreate ACORN.
Not just because they went down without cause due to a race-baiting lying fraud thug and the mix of Republican race-haters and Democrat surrender-pleaders who defunded the group.
But because they really were the only national group organizing nation-wide in poor communities and communities of color for economic justice, voter registration, and voter turnout.
The right way to honor Breitbart’s passing would be to fund the launch of ACORN II.
Jennifer
@Bennett: Nope, that’s not the case. I googled “Breitbart toxicology report” earlier this evening and got a hit from a news organization that had contacted the coroner’s office about this only a few days ago, and was told they were still waiting for the tox report to come in. No indication that anything’s being whitewashed, at this point, anyway.
Also, Breitbart hasn’t been dead 8 weeks – he died March 1 – it’s been about 6 weeks.
Jennifer
@El Cid: ACORN II – Electric Ooga-Booga, for more justice.
El Cid
@Jennifer: Children of the ACORN
El Cid
ACORN II: The Re-Blackening
Jennifer
Love Children of the ACORN!
“OUTLANDER! We’re comin’ for your white wimmin!”
kay
@Suffern ACE:
Pigford is complicated. It’s a book, basically.
That’s why it was so perfect for the liars.
Pigford contradicts a lot of conservative dogma
too.
Rural, black landowners who were treated differently than rural white landowners by local representatives of federal ag agencies. The black farmers lost their land in the farm crisis because they weren’t given the federal loan support that white farmers were given.
I think conservatives have to deny this happened, because it turns the whole “affirmative action” versus hard working white folk theme on its head.
Jennifer
@kay: I personally know some of the Pigford plaintiffs, having worked with a group of black farmers when we were trying to get a state department of Agriculture. Breitbart went from slandering my friend Abraham Carpenter on TV to later claiming that he was defending Carpenter because more or less, “he was one of the good ones” i.e., one of the farmers who really had faced discrimination and then was cheated out of his full share of the settlement by the folks Breitbart claimed were free riders.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of the case, except that these guys fought for over 10 years to get what, under law, should have been theirs from the beginning. At one point they approached 4th district congressman, then Jay Dickey (R-insane), for help, only to be told by Dickey that since none of them had contributed to his campaigns, they could more or less shove it. That’s the kind of shit these guys went through for over 10 goddamn years; for Breitbart to come along after the fact and start up his phony reverse-racism bullshit is more than anything what caused me to dance with joy when he died. He’s been gone 6 weeks now, and every day I find myself at some point thinking, “hey, Andrew Breitbart is dead, it’s a wonderful day!” I have to keep reminding myself to pace myself – he’s going to be dead for the rest of my life, so I have plenty of time to savor it.
kay
@Suffern ACE:
The beauty part of Pigford/ Breitbart is, he failed.
Big failure.
They failed in turning Sherrod/Pigford into “Obama’s reperation blackety-black scandal”.
It turned into a mess, they never got traction with the Pigford lie, and she sued them.
So that’s a happy ending :)
El Cid
@Jennifer:
i think i’m in love
kay
@Jennifer:
It made me laugh because the farm at the center of that case was a kind of co-op, which must just scare the shit out of them: “Co op! That’s like…communism!”
nastybrutishntall
Hamlet 2 is people, my friend.
Another Halocene Human
@Jennifer: Jennifer, you are awesome and kick ass.
Mary
I really hate to see the media maligning pit bulls.
brantl
@russell: Who would have predicted THAT?
brantl
@Sally Rakowski:
It isn’t irrational, he was a lying, contemptible, four-square dick. He saw the whole film of Shirley Sharrod, and the one on ACORN and he knew that he had dishonestly editted them to malign those people’s reputations. Hopefully, Sharrod’s suit will beggar his estate, as it should. I, and many others think that Andrew Breitbart was a shitstain on whatever honor the human race has, much like General Custer.
Sally Rakowski
Sorry, brantl, but that is irrational. It’s also pure conjecture that he saw the whole Sherrod tape and edited it on his own.
If you think he’s a dick, fine. But you won’t convince anybody that you’re not being irrational when you use conjecture to support your case.
Jennifer
He would have been a dick even without editing the tapes.
Here’s a guy from a privileged background (went to Tulane and lived in Brentwood) and what is his primary focus?
Hating on people and groups who worked to help people less fortunate than Andrew Breitbart. Significantly, people who had darker skin than Andrew Breitbart. He used his bullshit “patriotism” in supposedly defending taxpayers from the predations of ACORN as a cover for what was pretty obviously his racism. Had his concern really been about how taxpayers were being looted by organizations, he would have focused on banks or oil companies. The fact that instead he focused pretty exclusively on people and organizations whose focus was on helping poor and black people says everything you need to know about his motivations.
Fortunately, he’s still dead, and as a result, it’s another beautiful day.
Sally Rakowski
By your criteria, Jennifer, the Democrats who voted to cut off funding for ACORN were racists who hated on people and groups who worked to help people less fortunate than themselves.
By your criteria, people who constantly knock the Catholic Church are bigots who hate on people and groups who work tirelessly to help people less fortunate than themselves.
Your logic is woefully inconsistent….even if it weren’t for the fact you’re cheering the death of a man who left behind a wife and four young children.
And how could it be a beautiful day for you if ACORN no longer exists in order to do all the wonderful humanitarian things they used to do? Did one man’s early death settle the score for you in that regard?
Jennifer
@Sally Rakowski: Nice try with the strawmen.
The Democrats who voted to cut off funding to ACORN were spineless weasels, yes, but they did so IN RESPONSE TO lies created and spread by Andrew Breitbart, which only were proven to be lies after the vote to cut off funding.
People who constantly knock the Catholic Church for making it easier for priests to rape children or because the church now seems to think it can and should dictate the morality and behavoir of everyone who has already rejected it aren’t knocking “the Church” but rather its actions. Funny, I’ve not seen a lot of people railing against the use of Latin in the mass or the use of incense or anything of the sort, which would would expect if it was all about “hating” the church rather than the church’s misdeeds and overreach.
One man’s early death doesn’t settle the score on ACORN, but it sure makes things better. As for who Breitbart left behind, gee, it’s a shame he didn’t spend more of his time with them when he had the chance, rather than using his time to falsely slander and damage other people for the crime of not being or agreeing with Andrew Breitbart. The world is a better place without him, and I wager it will be a better place for those he left behind as well, since they won’t be subjected to living with a rageaholic or indoctrinated into believing that the essence of “patriotism” is destroying other people’s lives – through lies if necessary – for not agreeing with you.
Sally Rakowski
If you think Dems were spineless weasels to cut off funding in response to Brietbart’s lies, then I imagine you’d have some choice words for them now for not voting to fund them again. It’s not a straw man, Jennifer. Your logic would dictate that Dems are racist for not righting the wrong they enacted on ACORN, an organization that exists only to help the poor and less fortunate, when they voted to destroy them ion pretenses that were later deemed to be false.
Your justifying the knocking of the Catholic Church because they do bad things. The good things they do are nullified by those bad things. You’re not allowing for that same reasoning by Breitbart with regards to ACORN. It’s not a straw man, it’s not false equivalency, it’s just that your logic is inconsistent. Why don’t you be honest and just say that you hate religion and conservatives and you’ll be happy when both are wiped off the face of the earth and be done with it instead of going through these silly pretzel logic explanations?
Jennifer
@Sally Rakowski: You’re not very bright.
Sally Rakowski
That may be true, Jennifer. But I’ve asked you very easy questions and you’ve failed to answer them honestly or with any kind of clarity.
Several members of the NAACP audience laughed when Shirley Sherrod told them that at first she didn’t offer help to the white farmer. That is fact. Several employees of ACORN offered aid to O’Keefe and his accomplice for nefarious undertakings, that too is fact. Anthony Weiner posted nude pics of himself on Twitter, that is fact. And there is no video or audio whatsoever of anyone either spitting on or calling several black Congressmen the n-word, and this too is fact. It’s these facts that make you happy that the man who exposed them as facts is now dead.
It’s not sunlight that makes you happy, it’s darkness. You freely admit it.
El Cid
@Sally Rakowski: You just connected the story of Shirley Sherrod doing what was more than her job — what that farmer asked her about literally was not her job — with Anthony Weiner tweeting his dick.
You’re a fucking worthless, lying shit. Go the fuck away.
Sally Rakowski
No, Cidster, those two incidences are both things for which irrational liberals to this day still cannot hold their contempt for Andrew Breitbart.
You and Jennifer proved my point. He still lives. He still very much owns you.
Try meditation. Visualize the hatred flowing out of your mind and body all at the same time. Works for me with all sorts of things.
El Cid
@Sally Rakowski: Breitbart owns nobody. He owes somebody — namely, Shirley Sherrod, an actually courageous individual, who did something to improve this world.
You may think it impresses people to take the strategy of the 5 to 6 year olds who think that if you do something to annoy people, or if they mention that you annoy them, ‘you win’, but this isn’t really true.
It just means you’re annoying, and not in any sort of noble good way, just annoying.
There are some infantile types who think that ‘getting under somebody’s skin’ is some sign of winning, even winning an argument.
But in reality, it doesn’t work like that. Pointing out that Breitbart was a detestable, lying individual, whose absence from the public sphere is a net good, isn’t some sort of surrender, or admission that he was right — nor does it suggest that therefore the person saying so must be spending the entire rest of the day wandering aimlessly and unable to mutter anything else.
People are fully capable of, say, bitching for a minute about how terrible any of the Star Wars prequels were and then returning to work, or their life.
So it is with noting the difference between someone like Shirley Sherrod who was a courageous civil rights leader, both when it was time to register black voters in segregationist rural white Georgia and to fight for the interests of black farmers disgustingly and harmfully discriminated against by a bureaucratic establishment, and an inartful race-baiting cheap huckster like loudmouth Andrew Breitbart.
My being bothered at this idiot’s role — actually, his very presence — in our public life doesn’t mean you or he ‘won’, it just means I’m accurately assessing the unfortunate impact that some worthless shits can have on a nation’s public life.
Thankfully, again, he’s gone, and his Bizarro-world cheaper knockoffs (can you knockoff a fake Rolex? would that be a knock-knockoff, or is that a joke contest?) are collapsing into their own self-generated black hole of loserdom and personal venality.
But if it helps you get through the day to imagine that annoying someone means you or a Breitbart type ‘won’, hey, go ahead — the internet’s big enough for that, too.
Sally Rakowski
A political enemy of yours died, Cidster, that’s all. The world goes on. It’s not only irrational to pretend you’re overjoyed knowing he’s dead two months after his passing, it’s shallow, dishonest bravado.
One would like to think you’ve got better things to think about during your day.
It’s completely hypocritical to curse someone who spent way too much time blogging and speaking in order to fight a political battle when that’s exactly what you’re doing on several blogs every day, only less effectively. Everyone you write about is glorifying someone on the left as if they never did anything wrong or malicious, including the ACORN organization. Everything you’ve written about anyone on the right has been that they are pure evil. Yet somehow you think you’re different than Andrew Breitbart and you rationalize by pretending that you’re defending all that is good, whereas he worked to promote evil. That is irrational contempt, my friend.
El Cid
@Sally Rakowski:
To the extent that there’s any sense in this word pile-up, it seems that you’re suggesting that it’s a metaphysical difficulty to imagine that some people have wholly or nearly entirely negative and harmful impact on public life, whereas others have wholly or nearly entirely beneficial impact on public life.
Why would this require people be angels or devils to some magical degree? Why is this somehow outside the range of ordinary human probability? Why would this be historically unprecedented?
There’s no contradiction there at all.
Likewise, why would it be controversial to posit a difference between people whose impact on public life are negligible to middling versus others more harmful?
Surely this is and has always been the case.
Sally Rakowski
No, but I would say that you’re not in much of a position to be making an accurate assessment of the balance between good and evil in Andrew Breitbart’s life. You would tell me that he never did anything that wasn’t wrought out of pure evil and that that was a fact, when it’s unlikely you ever once ever tried to formulate an objective opinion about him.
Without knowing the first thing about me save for a few posts, you told me I was a worthless piece of shit and to go the fuck away. My point is you’re not interested in the truth about anyone if they don’t agree with you politically, and at the same time you fault Andrew Breitbart for the same thing.
Again, you’re really not all that different from him, it’s just that he worked a lot harder than you did and he was a lot more effective and a lot more successful at what he did, because you both think (thought) what you did was for the greater good and you both think what the other side did was wrong.