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That’s the phrase my Irish-American Nana would use, when an extended family member had done something she judged potentially embarrassing to the whole clan. (Eventually, I found out this was her interpretation of the Yiddish a shanda fur die goy.) And I could hear her voice saying it, when I first ran across this article in the Boston Phoenix:
Young, attractive, ambitious, conservative, and black, Nadia Naffe should have been a right-wing operative’s dream.
For a time, she was. Naffe served as a campaign coordinator in Florida for George W. Bush’s re-election effort, hobnobbed with conservative superstars like Andrew Breitbart, and joined the production team of James O’Keefe, the shock-videographer whose pranks humiliated NPR and made ACORN a dirty word…
Within weeks of meeting each other, O’Keefe and Naffe were teaming up to ambush progressive politicians and academics from coast to coast — raising gobs of money from some of the conservative movement’s biggest donors.
And then, in a single night nearly two years after they first met, Naffe’s life became a nightmare. She says O’Keefe took her to a barn and drugged her, then turned on her — setting off a campaign of intense harassment. For bloggers like Breitbart and his followers, hounding Naffe became a crusade. “RUIN HER,” wrote one commenter on a right-wing blog, in just a small example of the flames fanned at Naffe over the past year and a half. “Burn her f*cking world to the ground, and salt the earth as you leave. Make the wasteland a memorial to all who would consider pulling that kind of bullsh*t.” Indeed, Breitbart hounded Naffe to the end of his life. On the day of his death, one year ago this week, his final tweet was a snide jab aimed directly at her….
If you’re a stickler about speaking only good of the dead, I guess Andrew Breitbart would be proud that he could cause more trouble after his death than most people still on this side of the Styx.
Late Night Open Thread: The Breitbrats, Still ‘A Shanda for the Neighbors’Post + Comments (59)