I was thinking just today that writing about people who passed for me can seem like an exercise in actresses and diva singers, and that's not really all I'm about.
Of course, that doesn't mean I had a lot of thoughts on the passing of Davy Jones, either.
But Andrew Breitbart just died. Which seems odd, and sudden, and somehow too soon.
Breitbart will be known as the "conservative firebrand" who launched James O'Keefe, him of the "outlaw journalism" of exposing liberal "conspiracies" like ACORN... and the census. Even after O'Keefe was arrested (and pled guilty to) pranking the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu, Breitbart didn't quite give up on O'Keefe... though, in the long run, he seemed to put a little more distance between them.
I kept up with Breitbart because he seemed terribly energentic... and terribly angry. And I was never entirely sure as to why.
Conservatives - many of whom seem to have known him, but not well - talk about him as kind and generous in private. He benefitted tremendously from being in the right place at the right time, working with Matt Drudge on a very thorough approach to news aggregation that pointed to the real power of the internet, not as a vehicle for conservatism, but the real possibilities in sharing information on a global, massive scale. His most succesful follow up was a similarly thorough aggregation of news wire feeds at his own site, combining the AP and Reuters and others into a super news service. For a news junkie generalist like me, those things were indeed admirtable, even brilliant.
His politics, though, were odd: he gave voice to the kind of "muscular conservatism" that rose with talk radio, and he shared a lot of their biases and myopia; from Whitewater on, he seemd determined to expose liberal frauds with every breath. But he could be defensive when conservatives were challenged (never mind himself), and nowhere near as rigid, or thorough. He claimed a role as a serious "conservative journalist", yet couldn't seem to either define it well, or make of it more than angry screeds and trumped up exposes into the seedier aspects of people's private lives. If those he exposed were, some of them, no saints, Breitbart was never made more virtuous exposing them, either.
Ultimately, I tend to think that you get back what you give in the world; and the bitterness, anger, divisiveness and unhappy responses Breitbart generated (and which, despite claims to a thick skin, seemed to eternally annoy him), seemed evenly matched by what he put out. His "Big" websites - Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, etc - seemed small, cranky, eccentric exercises in shallow putdowns and knee jerk explosions of contempt. In some way, I think Breitbart knew that he could, and should, try to do better, be better, stuck in a dilemma of perpetual notoriety, lobbing grenades from the fringe. Anger, like any emotion, can be the fuse to light a fire which leads to political action. But as I keep saying, anger alone probably won't get you much in the way of results.
Breitbart will be remembered, I suspect, for all those angry things; all that he opposed, all that he disliked, all that he tried to discredit and deny. I personally can't think of a thing, not one, that I ever heard him focus on positively. And that's conservatism as it currently stands, isn't it? Not what you are for, but what you are against, what you can dislike, and demean, and dismiss. In his place will surely come others, with more of the same. More Shirley Sherrods! More Anthony Weiners, more scandals, small and mean spirited, one and all! And that's like a legacy, kind of... just not a good one.
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Posted by: Liberal Bias | March 12, 2012 at 02:57 AM