Breitbart has died.
- Thread starter Wok
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garbage can
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Guess you didn't know that Savage has been quarantined by the Repubs.
richard_daily
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Really?
He's not allowed to talk on air anymore?
If he's "quarantined" then why is vet quoting him?
Wok
Over compressed
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Really?
He's not allowed to talk on air anymore?
If he's "quarantined" then why is vet quoting him?
Savage and Levin do not like each other. Perhaps Savage is on ideological purity probation.
That, or Garbage Can prefers Levin.
richard_daily
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U
unregistered
Guest
Wok
Over compressed
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*shrug
Maybe the Republican Party is like the Bolsheviks. Quarantine political enemies, send them to re-education and make people good citizens.
Sean
We'll see.
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Why do Republicans hate the first amendment?
garbage can
North by Northeast
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Really?
He's not allowed to talk on air anymore?
If he's "quarantined" then why is vet quoting him?
Yes, really
The Libs are trying hard to get him off air, similar to how the Libs got him banned in Britain.
You're prolly going to have to asked V-man about that.
MeeMie
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Breitbart’s Last Laugh
Matt Labash
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.
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.
Our party arrived at our economy hotel, which sat next to a highway in the ghetto. It smelled of failure and water damage. Breitbart showed up late, letting me know he was on the grounds by sending a text which read: “We have to score some heroin before we head out….Wait, I think there’s someone outside my hotel room who can help.” We did not score heroin, which neither of us used, though in the hotel bar, we all doubled over as Andrew worked out his shtick during pre-game drinks as he proudly explained to us a new coinage of his – “Retrobate” – the process whereby one sexually fantasizes about aged actresses who you once had a crush on, in their younger incarnation.
Our friend, Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson, had won the Ayers dinner at an Illinois Humanities Council auction, and had brought us along. Tucker and I were a little worried that we had in our possession a human grenade in Breitbart, though if we were being honest with ourselves, that’s precisely why we brought him. With Andrew, every day was anything-can-happen day.
As it happened, Breitbart was on his best behavior. “I’m here to learn,” Andrew said facetiously. It was part of the pleasure of keeping company with him. He wasn’t just a friend, he was a co-conspirator. Once we arrived at the apartment, much to Andrew’s and Ayers’s chagrin, they got along famously. Just two guys having dinner, finding commonality, even if Andrew regarded it his hidebound duty to passive-aggressively heckle Ayers as he served us plates of hoisin ribs and farmhouse cheeses. (“This is the bomb, Bill,” Breitbart said to the former explosives-rigger.)
When Ayers asked me what I was reading right now, I told him “Moby Dick,” which actually lived up to its billing. Ayers agreed, though added, as any good academic would, “You’ve picked up the gay subtext?” Breitbart nearly choked on his tofu and quinoa. “You mean in Moby Dick?” Andrew asked. “Or at this dinner?”
Though the dinner took place on Super Bowl Sunday, Ayers and co. abruptly dismissed us before halftime, leaving our plan of attack only half realized, as we were attempting to ease into the evening like gentlemen and polite dinner guests. When we adjourned to the Drake Hotel bar to catch the end of the game and commiserate about how we got rolled, or “community organized” as Breitbart put it, I still had a list of Ayers questions that needed answering. So as I ticked through my list, I asked Breitbart to help fill in the blanks, in character, as Ayers. He eagerly obliged.
Me: “Who taught you how to make bombs? And could you still rig one up if pressed?”
Breitbart, as Ayers: “That’s interesting. I’d like for you to try this Chilean sea bass that’s been encrusted with a special Phyllo dough.”
The next morning, we rode together to the airport. As usual, I didn’t have to do much talking. Breitbart was full of stories and ideas and asides. He sang along lustfully when our cab driver blasted Tina Marie’s ‘80s hit “Lover Girl.” He told me of his super-secret guerrilla PR campaign for the upcoming documentary on him, appropriately titled, “Hating Breitbart.” He would start an anonymous website asking people to upload their hating Breitbart videos, in which they’d be encouraged to cap on him mercilessly. He would blindly commission – for high five figures – Obama propagandist Shepard Fairey to put up anti-Breitbart posters all over L.A. Then he’d call a press conference, announcing who the sponsor of all the anti-Breitbart animus was – Andrew Breitbart himself. It would’ve been a fine caper.
As we took our seats on the plane out of Chicago, Andrew was a row behind me. This I counted a blessing, thinking I could get some much-needed work-related reading done. But no such luck. Andrew asked his fellow row-mate, “Would you switch seats with him, so I can talk to him?” Andrew often seemed like he just wanted someone to talk to.
And so we did, for hours. We talked about his kids, whom he was crazy about. And we talked about one of his favorite films, Grandma’s Boy, about a slacker video game tester forced to move in with his grandmother. We talked about his sterling academic credentials (he pulled a solid 2.0 at Tulane, the New Orleans party school), and at his good fortune in finding his way in the world, even if finances were sometimes tight.
We talked about aging, as two middle-aged guys who get into the Bloody Mary cart at 11 in the morning sometimes will. I told Andrew that his good friend, Five for Fighting’s John Ondrasik, had a hit song called “100 Years” – about aging – that never ceases to freak me out. The protagonist of the song describes the different ages of his life – 15, 33, 45, and so on – that tick by in a blink. It doesn’t help, I told Andrew, that I was 33 when the song seemingly came out yesterday, but that I am closer to 45 now, thus illustrating Ondrasik’s point.
In a very rare spell of silence, Breitbart stewed for several minutes. Then, he wistfully replied, “Don’t worry, man. It’s something that bothers me, too. But I have it all figured out. We all need to go to work together every day from 9 am to 3 pm, whether we need to or not. In a classroom. We’ll even sit at those peninsula-shaped desks, with our pencil sharpeners and Elmer’s glue. And we’ll do it for nine months out of every year.”
“Why on earth?” I asked, puzzled.
“Because,” he said. “When we were in school, that was the last time we watched the clock, and wanted it to hurry up. The last time it took too long to get to the next thing.”
As we parted company at baggage claim, Andrew was still talking (as always) about how we needed to meet for drinks, about his next caper, about a proposed Grandma’s Boy viewing party. Neither of us knew that the time we were just speaking of was in shorter supply for him than for the rest of us. Makes me wish we were sitting at our peninsula-desks, stalling the clock.
Several years ago, when Breitbart was in the middle of one skirmish or another – I don’t even remember which one – I told him that I didn’t know whether I should encourage him, but that he made me laugh, as always. I asked him when someone finally shot him, “Can I read a poem at your memorial service? ”
“I think I should stop,” he admitted of his latest caper. “But it’s so fun and the hate mail is something to behold….And of course you can read my favorite poem, William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ at my wake.” Well my friend, you mercifully didn’t get shot. But here you go anyway:
I’ve never had any idea what the hell that poem means. And I suspect that neither Breitbart, nor William Carlos Williams, had a clue either. But it doesn’t matter. As Andrew held, sometimes absurdity is worth it for its own sake. And as he once wrote to me, “I hope people see that I’m dead serious about what I’m dead serious about, and besides that, it’s all about a good laugh.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/breitbart-s-last-laugh_633067.html
Matt Labash
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.
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.
Our party arrived at our economy hotel, which sat next to a highway in the ghetto. It smelled of failure and water damage. Breitbart showed up late, letting me know he was on the grounds by sending a text which read: “We have to score some heroin before we head out….Wait, I think there’s someone outside my hotel room who can help.” We did not score heroin, which neither of us used, though in the hotel bar, we all doubled over as Andrew worked out his shtick during pre-game drinks as he proudly explained to us a new coinage of his – “Retrobate” – the process whereby one sexually fantasizes about aged actresses who you once had a crush on, in their younger incarnation.
Our friend, Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson, had won the Ayers dinner at an Illinois Humanities Council auction, and had brought us along. Tucker and I were a little worried that we had in our possession a human grenade in Breitbart, though if we were being honest with ourselves, that’s precisely why we brought him. With Andrew, every day was anything-can-happen day.
As it happened, Breitbart was on his best behavior. “I’m here to learn,” Andrew said facetiously. It was part of the pleasure of keeping company with him. He wasn’t just a friend, he was a co-conspirator. Once we arrived at the apartment, much to Andrew’s and Ayers’s chagrin, they got along famously. Just two guys having dinner, finding commonality, even if Andrew regarded it his hidebound duty to passive-aggressively heckle Ayers as he served us plates of hoisin ribs and farmhouse cheeses. (“This is the bomb, Bill,” Breitbart said to the former explosives-rigger.)
When Ayers asked me what I was reading right now, I told him “Moby Dick,” which actually lived up to its billing. Ayers agreed, though added, as any good academic would, “You’ve picked up the gay subtext?” Breitbart nearly choked on his tofu and quinoa. “You mean in Moby Dick?” Andrew asked. “Or at this dinner?”
Though the dinner took place on Super Bowl Sunday, Ayers and co. abruptly dismissed us before halftime, leaving our plan of attack only half realized, as we were attempting to ease into the evening like gentlemen and polite dinner guests. When we adjourned to the Drake Hotel bar to catch the end of the game and commiserate about how we got rolled, or “community organized” as Breitbart put it, I still had a list of Ayers questions that needed answering. So as I ticked through my list, I asked Breitbart to help fill in the blanks, in character, as Ayers. He eagerly obliged.
Me: “Who taught you how to make bombs? And could you still rig one up if pressed?”
Breitbart, as Ayers: “That’s interesting. I’d like for you to try this Chilean sea bass that’s been encrusted with a special Phyllo dough.”
The next morning, we rode together to the airport. As usual, I didn’t have to do much talking. Breitbart was full of stories and ideas and asides. He sang along lustfully when our cab driver blasted Tina Marie’s ‘80s hit “Lover Girl.” He told me of his super-secret guerrilla PR campaign for the upcoming documentary on him, appropriately titled, “Hating Breitbart.” He would start an anonymous website asking people to upload their hating Breitbart videos, in which they’d be encouraged to cap on him mercilessly. He would blindly commission – for high five figures – Obama propagandist Shepard Fairey to put up anti-Breitbart posters all over L.A. Then he’d call a press conference, announcing who the sponsor of all the anti-Breitbart animus was – Andrew Breitbart himself. It would’ve been a fine caper.
As we took our seats on the plane out of Chicago, Andrew was a row behind me. This I counted a blessing, thinking I could get some much-needed work-related reading done. But no such luck. Andrew asked his fellow row-mate, “Would you switch seats with him, so I can talk to him?” Andrew often seemed like he just wanted someone to talk to.
And so we did, for hours. We talked about his kids, whom he was crazy about. And we talked about one of his favorite films, Grandma’s Boy, about a slacker video game tester forced to move in with his grandmother. We talked about his sterling academic credentials (he pulled a solid 2.0 at Tulane, the New Orleans party school), and at his good fortune in finding his way in the world, even if finances were sometimes tight.
We talked about aging, as two middle-aged guys who get into the Bloody Mary cart at 11 in the morning sometimes will. I told Andrew that his good friend, Five for Fighting’s John Ondrasik, had a hit song called “100 Years” – about aging – that never ceases to freak me out. The protagonist of the song describes the different ages of his life – 15, 33, 45, and so on – that tick by in a blink. It doesn’t help, I told Andrew, that I was 33 when the song seemingly came out yesterday, but that I am closer to 45 now, thus illustrating Ondrasik’s point.
In a very rare spell of silence, Breitbart stewed for several minutes. Then, he wistfully replied, “Don’t worry, man. It’s something that bothers me, too. But I have it all figured out. We all need to go to work together every day from 9 am to 3 pm, whether we need to or not. In a classroom. We’ll even sit at those peninsula-shaped desks, with our pencil sharpeners and Elmer’s glue. And we’ll do it for nine months out of every year.”
“Why on earth?” I asked, puzzled.
“Because,” he said. “When we were in school, that was the last time we watched the clock, and wanted it to hurry up. The last time it took too long to get to the next thing.”
As we parted company at baggage claim, Andrew was still talking (as always) about how we needed to meet for drinks, about his next caper, about a proposed Grandma’s Boy viewing party. Neither of us knew that the time we were just speaking of was in shorter supply for him than for the rest of us. Makes me wish we were sitting at our peninsula-desks, stalling the clock.
Several years ago, when Breitbart was in the middle of one skirmish or another – I don’t even remember which one – I told him that I didn’t know whether I should encourage him, but that he made me laugh, as always. I asked him when someone finally shot him, “Can I read a poem at your memorial service? ”
“I think I should stop,” he admitted of his latest caper. “But it’s so fun and the hate mail is something to behold….And of course you can read my favorite poem, William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ at my wake.” Well my friend, you mercifully didn’t get shot. But here you go anyway:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
I’ve never had any idea what the hell that poem means. And I suspect that neither Breitbart, nor William Carlos Williams, had a clue either. But it doesn’t matter. As Andrew held, sometimes absurdity is worth it for its own sake. And as he once wrote to me, “I hope people see that I’m dead serious about what I’m dead serious about, and besides that, it’s all about a good laugh.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/breitbart-s-last-laugh_633067.html
RjThoughts
I'm The Rojodi!
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The Sherry Sherrod incident has been since discovered to a lie, a well-done edit job, which caused her to lose her job, and her ability to sue those who aired the vastly editted tape.
That is the MAJOR incident which caused Breitbart to lose his abilitity to call himself a journalist. Instead of REPORTING the news, he BECAME the news, CREATED the news. Shame on him for that.
I totally agree that his stress was a major facotr in his death. Look at his wine-fueled screaming at the Occupiers during the CPAC. That was not normal, even for someone that had alcohol.
MeeMie
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Oh bullshit!
What was lost in the entire thing was the original point that the now infamous Sherrod clip showed members of the hypocritical NAACP apparently being sympathetic to racist thought, before Sherrod revealed her (supposed) change of heart from her own past, racist feelings.
How very convenient that is now forgotten, ignored, or has not been addressed. Yet that is an ‘inconvenient’ truth that was at the heart of this entire controversy.
Washington, D.C. – The following is a statement by Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research:
Shirley Sherrod falsely said Andrew Breitbart would “like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he’d like to see all black people end up again.” Then Sherrod said Breitbart is a racist, called Breitbart ”vicious,” and then said Breitbart’s alleged racism is why he’s allegedly “so vicious against a black president.”
By contrast, Breitbart ran a video of Sherrod that, unknown to him, was out of context, and later, according to media reports, Breitbart expressed regret. Sherrod became nationally famous, lost her job, saw her reputation rehabilitated within a day, was offered a new job, had a private conversation with a President of the United States of whom she thinks highly, and is now a hero to many. I’d be very much surprised if she hasn’t received some lucrative speaking offers.
Ultimately, no harm, no foul.
Furthermore, while Breitbart didn’t know the famous first video was out of context, Sherrod has to know she has no evidence Breitbart wants “all black people” to be slaves. Publishing the video without checking it out first it was an error, but it was nothing personal against Sherrod, and an unintentional error. When Sherrod said Breitbart wants black people to be slaves she was being intentionally malicious and irresponsibly inflammatory.
There’s no doubt about it. When the scales are weighed, Sherrod’s offense is far greater. She owes Breitbart an apology.
I don’t expect he’ll get one.
Shirley Sherrod has also said opponents of ObamaCare are racists.
I don’t suppose we’ll get an apology, either.
By contrast, Breitbart ran a video of Sherrod that, unknown to him, was out of context, and later, according to media reports, Breitbart expressed regret. Sherrod became nationally famous, lost her job, saw her reputation rehabilitated within a day, was offered a new job, had a private conversation with a President of the United States of whom she thinks highly, and is now a hero to many. I’d be very much surprised if she hasn’t received some lucrative speaking offers.
Ultimately, no harm, no foul.
Furthermore, while Breitbart didn’t know the famous first video was out of context, Sherrod has to know she has no evidence Breitbart wants “all black people” to be slaves. Publishing the video without checking it out first it was an error, but it was nothing personal against Sherrod, and an unintentional error. When Sherrod said Breitbart wants black people to be slaves she was being intentionally malicious and irresponsibly inflammatory.
There’s no doubt about it. When the scales are weighed, Sherrod’s offense is far greater. She owes Breitbart an apology.
I don’t expect he’ll get one.
Shirley Sherrod has also said opponents of ObamaCare are racists.
I don’t suppose we’ll get an apology, either.
The interesting thing here is that any ‘overreaction’ by the Right wing blogosphere was nothing compared to the reaction of an Obama administration riddled with radicals and racists and a NAACP riddled with radicals and racists. True she was thrown under that same bus as Obama’s pastor and grandmother, but Sherrod was pulled back mighty swiftly. Rosslyn Smith in Forty Acres & a Mule — Sherrod Style? raises some interesting questions about Sherrod’s involvement in supposed past racism claims by black farmers and families against the USDA that has already resulted in over a billion dollars being awarded.
I suppose that we should not be surprised that no one took responsibility for their own actions. Obama blamed the media, the NAACP said they were snookered, and pretty much everyone else blamed the vast right-wing conspiracy for it all. And through it all Breitbart continues to defend his posting of the video and does a fairly good job doing so. Even in Breitbart’s video it is clear by the end that the story was one of Sherrod having learned the error of her ways but absolutely no one, on the Right or on the Left, not to mention the NAACP or a fire-from-the-hip white house and USDA, seemed to actually have listened to the video that Breibart posted. Or at least not the whole thing. Amazing.
Let’s take a look at who else has been crying “wolf”, err I main “racist”, in this Obama, post-racial, world that we live in.
“We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black. We must not be afraid to turn a black out who votes against our interests.” –Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley
“Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a — they had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff. … We’ve got to stop being afraid of [Fox News host] Glenn Beck and the racist fringe of the Republican Party.” –former DNC Chief Howard “The Scream” Dean
Someone should let Dean know that Fox News didn’t even begin to cover the Sherrod “I’ve been framed” story until AFTER she had already been forced to resign her USDA position by the Obama administration. Fox News played little role in this entire thing and what they did report was basically no different than every other news organization in the nation. Perhaps he meant to say that the USDA and the NAACP “did something that was absolutely racist…had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip.” Yeah, I’m sure that is what he really meant.
“In the last decade I’ve been warned that electing Republicans will result in the burnings of black churches. The Tea Party is racist, John McCain is racist, the GOP is racist, anyone who doesn’t like President Obama is racist, opposition to now-Justice Sotomayor is racist and opposition to the “public option” is racist. It seems today that one can hardly take a stand on any important issue at all without having to consider the racial implications. I have no doubt that some members of the Tea Party, GOP, and even some Democrats and White House staffers are racist, but there are all sorts of good reasons to dislike just about any policy that have nothing to do with race. The charge of racism sweeps away legitimate objections and turns everything into an issue of right versus wrong, good people versus child molesters, True Belief versus witches. It turns politics into a cross between religion and a nasty game of “gotcha.” – Jim Picht
In the end it turned out Sherry Sherrod may not have been quite the sinner she may have initially appeared but she is certainly no martyr, role model, or saint.
Instead, she turned out to be just a typical lemming liberal; quick to cry out for censorship of those she disagrees with, a hateful and mean-spirited opinion of those who disagree with her ideologically, and as ready and able to cry ‘racist’ as any she accused of doing the same to her.
How long though until a book deal is offered or the Lifetime made-for-TV movie The Smearing of Sherry Sherrod is playing in your living room?
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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- May 27, 2004
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Oh, I dig: Breitbart was LT.
RjThoughts
I'm The Rojodi!
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Spoken like a true Dittohead. The video HE showed was majorly edited, items taken out of context, and pushed HIS thesis. Sorry, he showed what Conservatives wanted and ONLY what he wanted. To use Fox news as a source, who has yet to show the ENTIRE speach, shows that you have NO clue as to what journalism is, report and record, not create news
richard_daily
Slut Whisperer
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Someone forced him to ask it?
Sounds like....
MARXISM!
Or some equally scary phrase used out of context.
MeeMie
No Spam Here
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- Jun 1, 2005
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- 7,328
Spoken like a true loonie ... omitting important previously posted factors such as:
"By contrast, Breitbart ran a video of Sherrod that, unknown to him, was out of context, and later, according to media reports, Breitbart expressed regret."
"Furthermore, while Breitbart didn’t know the famous first video was out of context, Sherrod has to know she has no evidence Breitbart wants “all black people” to be slaves. Publishing the video without checking it out first it was an error, but it was nothing personal against Sherrod, and an unintentional error. When Sherrod said Breitbart wants black people to be slaves she was being intentionally malicious and irresponsibly inflammatory."
"Furthermore, while Breitbart didn’t know the famous first video was out of context, Sherrod has to know she has no evidence Breitbart wants “all black people” to be slaves. Publishing the video without checking it out first it was an error, but it was nothing personal against Sherrod, and an unintentional error. When Sherrod said Breitbart wants black people to be slaves she was being intentionally malicious and irresponsibly inflammatory."
Truth be told, Sherrod spoke those words... and she has a long history of taking advantage of situations with racial undertones. She's hardly innocent of slinging "racist" accusations.
Andrew Breitbart was a fervent believer in equality. He was a premier shit stirrer, and proud of it. Those who knew him found him to be very heartfelt, courageous and humorous. None of those qualities represent the opinion you have of him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAHJsJqgcts&feature=player_embedded
Lorilei
asexual prude
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I
IndieSnob
Guest
Ahahahahaha!
Wait, I thought the wingnuts said that it was those on the left that had no compassion.
Yet the author of the story was hacked and had his personal information published by a bunch of psychopathic loonies.
Lorilei
asexual prude
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No, the utterly silly and preposterous question of whether Breitbart -- not an ordinary man, perhaps, but an exceptional one only in the Special-Olympian sense -- met his death by (someone else's) foul play is not one he or anyone needed to ask.
CHNOPS
Loves amps
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I love the "I'm just asking questions" defense, which is used exclusively by people who are just making statements.
U
unregistered
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U
unregistered
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M
miles
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Jesus, what mindless drivel.
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