Breitbart Takes A Dirt Nap

From Cynical Times courtesy of somebody or some organization I'm friends with on facebook:

Propagandist Andrew Breitbart collapsed and died Thursday while walking near his home in Los Angeles, leaving behind a string of wrecked individuals and organizations devoted to the less fortunate.

As a conservative media hatchetman and journalist of convenience, Breitbart has been at the forefront of the race to the bottom in both national news and politics for more than a decade. The 43-year-old melded political activism with propaganda to bring woe to liberal causes and individuals who often seemed incapable of defending themselves against his virulent attacks. He was facing the legal consequences for that aggressive partisan behavior at the time of his death.

Breitbart, who was raised in Los Angeles' upscale Brentwood community, and his youthful sidekick, James O'Keefe, who was raised in the affluent New Jersey community of Westwood, formed a kind of dynamic duo for those seeking to mislead the faltering middle class on behalf of predatory elites. They used partially staged and heavily edited videotapes to exaggerate the sins of their political opponents and spread them so rapidly via conservative websites that the mainstream news media was forced to match many of their alleged "scoops" without thoroughly vetting them.

The result was an echo chamber where conservative lies quickly took on the appearance of truth. The debris created by those misrepresentations left many political and news insiders in puzzlement Thursday as they struggled to praise the life of a damaging and divisive figure at the time of his passing.

"It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous," conservative David Frum said of Breitbart. "When one of the leading media figures of the day achieves his success by his giddy disdain for truth and fairness—when one of our leading political figures offers to his admirers a politics inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas—how to withhold a profoundly negative judgment on his life and career?"

More here.

I was in grad school when right-wing religious scum bag Jerry Falwell kicked the bucket. In addition to teaching an undergraduate acting class, part of my assistantship responsibilities was working in the university's professional theater office, which is where I was when the news broke on the internet. Needless to say, virtually everyone in the theater business is pretty liberal; I thought nothing about dancing a jig while I made the announcement to my co-workers, who immediately joined in the festivities. Of course, the phrase "virtually everyone" doesn't mean "everyone." One fellow, a conservative, actually a fair-minded guy who I liked a lot, quickly scolded us, lecturing, "A man has died; how can you be celebrating?"

I backed down out of respect for my conservative friend, but I did defend myself: "This is the guy who blamed 9/11 on feminists, gays, and abortionists. He blamed Katrina on gays. And that's just a tiny little bit of the bile and venom he spewed for decades, always cloaked in a pathetic veneer of religious respectability."

I feel essentially the same way about Andrew Breitbart, except that I think he was worse. Indeed, Falwell was always simply riffing on his psychotic far right kooky Biblical interpretations--that is, despite his evil, there was always, at least, a sense of authenticity about him, a sense that he believed what he was saying. Breitbart, in stark contrast, went to great pains to construct elaborate lies about the people he considered to be political enemies. And many of those people, including the 300 ACORN workers who lost their jobs because of his smear campaign against the organization, weren't even public figures; they were just ordinary people rendered into collateral damage in the conservative blogger's solo crusade to destroy all things liberal.

I mean, think about it: debate is one thing; lying and smearing, just because you think it's justified by your ideology, is quite another. Breitbart was human trash. Total scum. A major manifestation of everything that's wrong with this country today. And I'm supposed to mourn him? Just because "a man has died"? No fucking way. The world is a better place now that piece of shit is dead.

Fuck you Andrew Breitbart. You were the absolute worst my generation has to offer. Fuck off and die.

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