Breitbart’s Last Laugh

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I woke up this morning to about ten emails from journalist friends asking if our mutual friend, Andrew Breitbart, was really dead. “Really” was the operative word. Some meant it in the traditional sense: Is it possible for the human inferno that Breitbart resembled to have actually been extinguished at age 43, leaving his elegant wife Susie and his four beloved children behind? Several, however, meant it as in: Is Andrew really dead? Many of us didn’t know if we could trust the announcement, thinking this could be another Breitbart caper, as he always had two or three in his back pocket.
breitbart and co.

By way of greeting, I used to ask Breitbart what kind of evil he was up to.

“Most kinds,” he’d say, gamely.

So one could easily have envisioned this being the latest Breitbart media stunt: Fake your own demise, go missing for 24 hours, thus encouraging all your ideological adversaries to bleat and fume and make asses of themselves just to prove what kind of sonsofbitches you were up against. Let the record show that tasteful blogger Matt Yglesias came through like clockwork, nearly getting ahead of the Los Angeles coroner’s announcement by crowing: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.” (Well done, Matt! Perhaps you could pass your thoughtful sentiments on to his fatherless children, since they likely don’t follow you on Twitter. Prick.)

But sadly, it was not Andrew’s last, greatest caper. Breitbart himself, of course, would’ve not only expected such aggression, but would’ve laughed at it, and even egged it along. One of his favorite pastimes was retweeting his own hate mail, which was voluminous. As a partisan warrior and a guerrilla theater aficionado – half right wing Yippie, half Andy Kaufman (his Twitter picture at the time of his death was a Jesus-sighting style imprint of his face on a piece of toast) – he made it his vocation to make people crazy. Whatever detractors say, or more likely, whatever they spray, Breitbart clearly excelled at his job.

His intensity could alternately be amusing and taxing. When he’d call you in the white-hot fever of one of the headline-garnering skirmishes that he’d inserted himself into – ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, Anthony Weiner’s schwantz pictorials – you knew that you could set the phone down, run some errands, and do some light yard work, then return without him ever realizing that you’d been gone. One of the many benefits of being friends with Andrew was that when he was on fire, which was often, there was no need to carry your share of the conversational load.

But at heart, he was in it for more than scoring points for “The Movement” as he unironically called it. As anyone who has seen his recent CPAC speech knows, Breitbart had the brains, the talent, and the animal charisma to get people to set cars on fire for him, or to run off with him to the desert where he might start his own anti-Obama doomsday cult. But while he believed in what he espoused, perhaps a little too much, he was also in it for other reasons – for action, and for amusement. He didn’t just hit scandal head-on. He enjoyed coming at it slyly. He gloried in the art of presentation. A few years back, when getting drinks with Andrew, his wife, and Fox News host Greg Gutfeld at a Washington, D.C. hotel, Breitbart showed me his Twitter mug shot.

Since he knew that I despise Twitter on principle, I thought he was deliberately sticking me in the eye. But he wasn’t. “Seriously,” he said. “Take a look. Do you notice anything different about me?” In the photo, he had newly grown facial hair. He was looking off into the middle distance in a way that did not quite resemble himself.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you lose weight? Get a haircut?”

“NO!!!!” he exclaimed, with some disappointment. “It’s exactly like Eric Boehlert’s Twitter picture! I’m mirroring him!” he said of his bête noire from the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which regularly tormented Breitbart, and which in turn, was tormented by him.

There’s not a chance I could pick Eric Boehlert out of a police lineup. But there’s no way Breitbart would’ve known that. He was a man who both loved and hated with his whole heart, often getting wrapped around the axle of his own narrative. When I looked at his long-suffering wife, asking her what she made of this, she affectionately shrugged her shoulders. The universal loving-wife symbol for, “What can you do?”

I tried to calm Breitbart down several times, to no avail. A few years back, he told me the doctor said that he needed to decelerate his stress levels. Consequently, he wanted me to teach him how to fly fish. Then he thought better of it. The problem, he admitted, was, “Every time I see a tree, I just want to kick its ass.”

The last time I saw Andrew was just a few weeks ago in what turned out to be one of his last capers: dinner at a swank Chicago penthouse with former Weather Underground terrorists/Obama confidants Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Andrew and I often disconnected on politics. Even though we were both conservatives, his mode was a little ferocious for my taste. We knew this, however. And so, it was never an issue. What was important is that he had the quality that all people I like most have: he made me laugh. Whatever his faults, he was wicked and loyal and funny – both sick and dark in the best possible way.

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Sir Breitbart you will be missed. God bless the fire your started. “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.” We will carry the flame.

To quote my father,” Conservatives aren’t taking sh*t from liberals anymore.”
Andrew was of that vein.
Long live the brass knuckle Conservative.

There rides a paralel story with the early death of Honore’ Mirabeau less then two years following the storming of the Bastille. He was a constitutionalist considered by many to then be the George Washington of France. His history complies that he was a realist willing to work within and structurally change the feudalist royalist system of governance. After his death the clubs Jacobin and Cordelier seized stronger grip on the politics and revolution which led to the guillotine Reign of Terror.
Andrew Breitbart, stretching to the limits of opposition resistance, stayed – nevertheless – within the rails of honest political discourse with his clever levers opening up those clap trapped political oysters. He will be missed.

@mossomo: Yes, the right will carry on his lies. That’s what they are good for, after all. Breitbart is the personification of the GOP; liar, hater, fear monger.

Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/andrew-breitbart-death-of-a-douche-20120301

@Hard Right: Aw, bullshit. Are you stupid or just a parrot? The liberals have been eating GOP shit for so long it’s sickening. Since Bush and his trampling of our Constitution to the lame tea party rhetoric and race baiting. It’s time you guys just stfu.

@ Liberalmann…..Bush trampled the Constitution???? Gee, so then, you must REALLY hate BARRY, for Committing TREASON against the U.S.A.!!! How so?? read the Constitution, Article 2, section 1, “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”…. so, there you have it, Obama does NOT qualify, to even have RUN for POTUS…. BIRTHER?? NO, not hardly STUPID, I can read, and see the FACTS of the case……and if you STILL are in denial.. Read US Supreme Court case “Minor vs Happersett”…. the SCOTUS case backs ME up.. what do you have to LEGALLY back YOU up???

The Supreme court ruled that…… “The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Missouri voting legislation, saying that voting was not an inherent right of citizenship, that the Constitution neither granted nor forbade voting rights for women, and that allowing only male citizens to vote was not an infringement of Minor’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.[11]

The opinion (written by Chief Justice Morrison Waite) first asked whether Minor was a citizen of the United States, and answered that she was, citing both the Fourteenth Amendment and earlier common law. Exploring the common-law origins of citizenship, the court observed that “new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization” and that the Constitution “does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens.” Under the common law, according to the court, “it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.” The court observed that some authorities “include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents”—but since Minor was born in the United States and her parents were U.S. citizens, she was unquestionably a citizen herself, even under the narrowest possible definition, and the court thus noted that the subject did not need to be explored in any greater depth.”

Obama is NOT a Natural born citizen, as ruled and stated by the US Supreme Court…. Birther?? No, just a man, backed by the LAW, facts, and Truth.. so, what does that make YOU?? think about it……