Andrew Breitbart is gone. Let me offer my extended condolences to ...
-- Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.
Why should someone's death require that we pretend that he is not, as Matt Taibbi puts it with far too much affection, a douchebag? Some have suggested that it's wrong to rejoice in the death of another human being -- anyone. And I happen to share a similar sentiment. It's just that I don't think that rejoicing is the same thing as a frank assessment of how harmful Breitbart was both to the political discourse and to the individuals he slandered, like Shirley Sherrod, or to the institutions he had a hand in dismantling, like Acorn.
Those who praise Breitbart in his death risk honoring his pernicious political ideals, or at the very least normalizing them, making them implicitly acceptable. They also imply that there's nothing serious about political discourse -- that it is a game without consequences, and that when an opponent drops out of the game we're to politely heap praise on his superior gamesmanship. That might be a suitable reaction if Breitbart were a tennis player. But when it comes to politics, it's far more cynical than the frank admission that Breitbart did and was doing tremendous harm, and there will be less of it in the world now that he is gone.