I know, I know: De mortibus nihil nisi bonum. But the Roman Empire fell almost two millennia ago, and we at the Left-Wing Noise Machine have a right (nay, a duty) to celebrate the demise of Andrew Breitbart, a man who, if Yeats were alive, would have been the reference to the poet’s line in “The Second Coming: “the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” He was, after all, the subject of one of our first reports on the utter lunacy and ugliness of conservatism, which involved an incident where he roller skated in front of protestors at a Koch Brothers' confab of billionaires to destroy democracy, spouting his defense of neo-fascism on wheels. See Breitbart's famous skating disaster here: http://leftwingnoisemachine.com/...
Such was Breitbart: an actual clown in a movement of intellectual clowns.
Breitbart grew up as a disturbed angry man who spent his career lying about anybody who promoted democracy and justice in this country. He slouched toward Fox News to be born with one smear campaign against progressives after the next, blaming the Clarence Thomas hearings for his "conversion" (his word) to knownothing conservatism. But the Leftwing Noise Machine thinks it was the whiskey. True to form, in his last public appearance ( the annual cult gathering of rightwing hierophants at the Conservative Political Action Conference) a couple weeks ago, he spewed spittle and comments about how Democrats are evil, evil.
That about sums up his obituary. A true conservative life. The only real issue is whether he was roller skating when he collapsed on the street. We think he was.
Did I mention that within hours of Ted Kennedy’s death Breitbart called the Senator a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement”? De mortibus nihil nisi faecum. Special? Was Breitbart proffering a compliment?
The real news is not Breitbart’s merciful death, which probably represents a rare instance of divine justice at work in the world, but the fact that the media immediately heaped encomia on him, not excrement. Media Matters praised his “passion and commitment” (apparently having never read Yeats). Media personality and political opportunist, Arianna Huffington, who inexplicably worked with the prick (did I just write that?) and gave his odious knownothing views air time, praised him for something or other. Weirdly, the USDA employee, Shirley Sherrod, who was fired from her job after Breitbart defamed her using traditional racist conservative tropes (“blacks are racists, not us! Blame blacks!") sent condolences to his unclowned family. Perhaps she was being ironic. She should have been.
That’s the real news here, that after all these years of the cult of conservative talking heads like Breitbart, fueled by billionaire plutocrats like the Koch Brothers (the patrons Breitbart bootlicked the most) with their smear campaigns and delusions, there are still some Americans, even some progressive Americans, who just don’t get it: Breitbart was a caterpillar on the Republic. We are all better off now that he and his ugly rhetoric have gone to the skating rink in hell.
http://leftwingnoisemachine.com/...