Andrew Breitbart's heart was too big to fail, but it did anyway. Posted on 03/03/2012 4:20:53 AM PST by Kaslin
Andrew Breitbart's heart was too big to fail, but it did anyway.
If you don't know who Breitbart was, you haven't been paying attention. A conservative activist, entrepreneur, author, muckraker, media pioneer and performance artist of sorts, in his heart he was a radical.
His friends saw him as a fearless truth-teller and provocateur. (The word "fearless" will have to be retired from overuse when all of his obituaries have been written.) His enemies, and they are legion even in death, saw him as the most vile creature who ever slithered upon the earth.
Within hours of the news, Twitter lit up with repugnant and ghoulish statements from left-wingers celebrating the premature death of a man with four small children. I won't repeat them because the ones printable in a family newspaper aren't representative, and the ones that are representative aren't printable.
Andrew relished such attacks, truly, because they proved to him that he was having great effect in his work and that his opponents had run out of serious arguments.
This is not to say that Andrew was beyond criticism. He made mistakes. He took full swings at some pitches he should have just let go. He overstated some things that needed to be said, and said some things that didn't need to be said at all. He was a human run-on sentence who showed deference to no punctuation mark save the exclamation point, a conservative Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons we both grew up on, whirling and whizzing through anything in his path. Giving him a dose of Ritalin to treat his hyperactivity would be like throwing a glass of water on a five-alarm fire.
But the hatred his enemies had for him overshot his faults like a dart thrown past the board and over the moon.
Others will talk of his accomplishments: working for the Drudge Report in its infancy, creating websites and businesses, pioneering new forms of media and exploiting the inherent weaknesses and pieties of the old media. And many who knew him will talk of his personal kindness: how the only times he slowed down were when he needed to lend an ear, do a favor or talk about how much he loved his family.
Those things matter more than the politics, but they are not what made him a public figure. If being kind and loving your family made you famous, countless plumbers, carpenters and accountants would be famous too.
No, what made him a public figure is what drove him to leap into battle day after day. Andrew had profound contempt for those on the left who claimed a birthright to a monopoly on virtue and tolerance.
He rejected in the marrow of his bones the idea that conservatives needed to apologize for being conservative or that liberals had any special authority to pronounce on the political decency and honesty of others.
Indeed, when liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.
He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on ObamaCare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge -- recycled over and over by the media -- was a lie.
The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism's undeserved monopoly on the "narrative" -- one of his favorite words.
"60 Minutes" won awards for hidden cameras, but when he used the same technique to embarrass liberals, such tactics were suddenly proclaimed ethically beyond the pale. The joke was on the scolds because they had to cover the stories anyway. And the stories got results. Congress defunded ACORN. Heads rolled at NPR. Andrew understood that news and arguments change politics if you can get the news and arguments to the people -- and if you don't let those who don't like what you say define you.
Whatever his faults, that was my friend's great and remarkable strength: He never let the bastards get him down. That took away his enemies' greatest power, and they hated him all the more for it.
Great tribute. Breitbart knew how to get under Liberals’ skin because he was a huge Lib himself before converting to Conservatism.
copied from another message board:
” LET US ALL THINK CLEARLY FOR A MOMENT: DO YOU REMEMBER THE PASSAGE OF THE NDAA WHICH PERMITS THE PRESIDENT TO DESIGNATE AMERICANS TO BE MURDERED ON AMERICAN SOIL? . . . WILL TIME DISCLOSE TO US THAT ANDREW BREITBART WAS ASSASSINATED AT THE ORDER OF OBAMA UNDER THE NDAA LEGISLATION ? THAT LEGISLATION PURPORTS TO MAKE SUCH A MURDER LEGAL WHEN ORDERED BY THE PRETENDER PRESIDENT OBAMA.... OBAMA IS THE NEW ADOLPH HITLER OF THE 21ST CENTURY. SUPPORTED BY 93 OF THE U. S. GOVERNMENT (TRAITORS ALL, DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS) SENATORS AND 283 MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES (TRAITORS ALL; DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS)”
His death makes me ill..
The best tribute yet, from a good friend. The more I read about Breitbart, the more I wish I had known him. He truly was a giant among men and he will be sorely missed. I just hope there is someone out there courageous enough to try to fill his big shoes.
Imus also thought it was amusing that someone had defaced Andrew Breitbart's wiki article.
I say drug-addled because Imus was a long-time ILLEGAL drug abuser and I believe that at that level of abuse drugs to not entirely clear the body.
Those were all first-hour comments; usually Drug-addled Don repeats the first hour's opening comments in the second and third hours -- to the best of my recollection -- there was no mention of Breitbart in the second and third hours. Maybe his staff got him to understand his sickness and the torment that he was causing.
Jonah Goldberg was fighting back tears when they had him on Fox right after the announcement of Breibart’s death. They’d been friends a long time.
“someone out there courageous enough to try to fill his big shoes.” Actually , momofmarine (so am I), I guess it is time for all of us to “Be BreitBart!” or B-cubed.
You know it would not surprise me if he was, but will we ever find out?
Even in death Breitbart wins, as the vile hatred of him expressed by the leftists exposes them as just two-bit members of the “Omelet Club”: phonies who claim to love humanity but are only too eager to destroy individual humans to prove their own moral superiority.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were willing to “break a few eggs” by carrying out murder at the scale of millions of lives; the jerk-offs at DU and MoveOn and their ilk are forced to stop at the verbal debasement of people like Breitbart - but they stop at that point only because they can’t get away with worse (yet).
I remain convinced that LBJ had people murdered.. including USDA investigator Henry Marshall murdered to try to stop the prosecution of Billie Sol Estes. What would someone like a LBJ do to stop the prosecution of himself.. oh, wait.. we know.
Goldberg is one of our best writers.
Good question.
Better question: What would he do to become President, in place of the hated Kennedys?
“If the tapes come out, he died of a heart attack,” the caller said. “If the tapes don’t come out, they whacked him.”
AB put on display the lefties love of humanity but hatred of people.
BTTT
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Obama: “They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun”
Obama to His Followers: “Get in Their Faces!”
Obama on ACORN Mobs: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!”
Obama to His Mercenary Army: “Hit Back Twice As Hard”
Obama on the private sector: “We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.“
Obama to voters: Republican victory would mean “hand to hand combat”
Obama to lib supporters: “It’s time to Fight for it.”
Obama to Latino supporters: “Punish your enemies.”
Obama to democrats: “I’m itching for a fight.”
Posted HERE: If the Left is Serious About "Toning Down the Rhetoric," It Can Start at the White House
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Even now moonbats in Minnesota believe that George W Bush ordered an Air National Guard F-16 from Duluth to shoot down Paul Wellstone’s plane. Yes, this was on Minnesota Public Radio.
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