Danation: Andrew Breitbart, We Knew Ye Too Well
Breitbart speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on Feb. 10. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
I had planned to post a take on the upcoming U.S. Senate races today, especially given the changing landscape in two states. In Nebraska, former Senator Bob Kerrey, of Medal of Honor and war crime fame, announced he would indeed run for the Senate seat being vacated by conservative Democrat Ben “Don’t Call Him a Moderate” Nelson, reversing a decision he had made days before. And in Maine, moderate Republican Olympia Snowe announced her own retirement, turning the state from a likely Republican pick up to a likely Democratic one. Both of Maine’s representatives in the House, Chellie Pingree and Mike Michaud, may run for the seat, and three Democratic candidates were already in the race before Sen. Snowe announced her retirement. There’s also the rumored independent run by Maine’s favorite son, Stephen King, a rumor I just started because I think it would be awesome.
But talk of the Senate races will have to wait, because news came down this morning of the death of Andrew Breitbart, a criminally swinish oaf who largely destroyed what little reputation the media had left. Ironically, while he had intended to slap the media down with sites such as Big Journalism, it was instead his own duplicitous, disgusting methods that served the purpose. My first reaction upon hearing the news was to tweet out, “Does it say more about me or Andrew Breitbart that when his site reports his death, I don’t believe it?”
Breitbart started his career as a researcher for Arianna Huffington, but just as Huffington had a conversion from conservatism to liberalism, so Breitbart went from working for Huffington to founding his own sites dedicated to the prospect that all news media other than his, and Fox News and a handful of others, were involved in some liberal conspiracy to ensure that the facts they reported were all biased toward some sort of communist, one-world plot. It has long been a problem in conservative circles that, as Stephen Colbert once remarked, facts have a well-known liberal bias. This has caused men like Breitbart to shoot the messenger again and again, simply unable to believe that it could be their worldview that is deeply skewed, not the actual facts on the ground.
In service to his cause, Brietbart destroyed the career of an innocent woman named Shirley Sherrod by manipulating video tape to make her seem racist. His proxy James O’Keefe, destroyed ACORN, an organization dedicated to voter registration and community organizing (heaven forfend!) using the same techniques of selectively editing video to put subjects in the worst light possible. In doing this and so much more, Andrew Breitbart became the very thing that he most loathed — a journalist bent on skewing reporting to serve his own biases. He represented the worst tendencies of the industry, purified into a perfect diamond of brazen ineptitude, wanton ignorance, and total amorality.
He was a duplicitous bastard and a villain, and his body should be dropped into Yellowstone Park to be devoured by wolves.
No comments yet.