Reasonmeister Nick Gillespie explains why Andy was such a great guy here: “His legacy has nothing to do with whether the Republican party picked up Anthony Weiner’s congressional seat or whether ACORN has been able to renew its funding. It has to do with the ways in which he created new places and spaces to talk about whatever any of us want to talk about. He told Reason in 2004 that after feeling ignored by existing outlets, “We decided to go out and create our media.”
For my part, I tend to agree with conservative traitor David Frum, whom I’ll quote from more extensively:
“It’s hard even to use the word “issues” in connection with Andrew Breitbart. He may have used the words ‘left’ and ‘right,’ but it’s hard to imagine what he ever meant by those words. He waged a culture war minus the ‘culture,’ as a pure struggle between personalities. Hence his intense focus on President Obama: only by hating a particular political man could Breitbart bring any order to his fundamentally apolitical emotions.
“Because President Obama was black, and because Breitbart believed in using every and any weapon at hand, Breitbart’s politics did inevitably become racially coded. Breitbart’s memory will always be linked to his defamation of Shirley Sherrod and his attempt to make a national scandal out of back payments to black farmers: the story he always called ‘Pigford’ with self-conscious resonance.
“Yet it is wrong to see Breitbart as racially motivated. Had Breitbart decided he hated a politician whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, Breitbart would have been just as delighted to attack that politicians with a different set of codes. The attack was everything, the details nothing.”
Breitbart was proud to hang with right-wing icons like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who have made their careers attacking liberals as traitors. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. To my mind, Andy always needed a bath.
Afterwords
Nothing made Breitbart madder than the frequent liberal accusation that any opposition to Obama was racist. And now we have U.S. District Judge Richard F. Cebull, Montana’s chief federal judge, appointed by President Bush II in 2001, sending out a grotesquely racist joke, with a grotesquely racist “frame,” from his official courthouse address, the latest in a long line of racist emails from state Republican Party officials and appointees around the country—emails that, of course, do not reflect their true feelings.
Beyond the attractions of racism, which Limbaugh of course has wallowed in, it’s curious that all of these bad boys, though often aggressively libertarian in spirit—born mischief-makers—always end up bowing to authority. What did Breitbart think of the utterly fraudulent war in Iraq? What of the utterly fraudulent claims that Iran constitutes an “existential threat” to “world civilization”? He’d rather call a liberal chick a “despicable life form.” Hey, frat boy! Party’s over!
*I could add Joe McCarthy to this list, but that would be (a little) unfair. Like Andy, Joe regarded politics as a game, but the way Joe played, people didn’t get embarrassed for little, but rather ruined for nothing. I discuss David Brinkley’s take on Joe here.
