Friday, March 02, 2012

Andrew Breitbart Gone and With Him Goes His Hate


Andrew Breitbart
1969 - 2012
---
Mr. Andrew Breibart is gone but he won’t be forgotten. He
will be long remembered for his bigotry and lies; and for
his hatred towards those he deemed unfit.

I feel sorrow for his mother’s loss but also I feel anger at
how she apparently raised him. If I had
a son who displayed such disrespect for others by using
character assassination as a weapon to obliterate people
like Shirley Sherrod, and organizations’ like ACORN, while
feeling a sense of victory, upon their ruin, I would feel
DEEP SHAME.

In essence, people like Sherrod and the hard workers at
ACORN were only the tip of the iceberg of the nasty deeds
perpetrated by Breitbart upon his fellow human beings.
His legacy will exhibit a long list of vile attempts to
annihilate reputations of those who did not happen to fit
into his cold-hearted dogmatism.

I know there are some that shared his warped sense of
‘who is’ and ‘who is not’ valuable in our society and they
will miss him,
but I am not one of them.

Right now the Internet is ablaze with his death.
The right-wing is calling him an angel and a warrior and is
strongly criticizing the left for acting gleeful over his death
but I just came across something that Breitbart had written
after the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy:

{{After Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts died in
2009, Breitbart tweeted, "Rest in Chappaquiddick" and
called him "a special pile of human excrement."
When critics questioned his tone, he tweeted they "missed
my best ones!"}}


Now that's nasty but it also is typical Breitbart.


thinkingblue

~~~~~~~~~~

Some thoughts from David Frum at the Daily Beast. “Breitbart reinvented the culture war and made it more about personalities than issues. Along the way, he got some stories right (Anthony Weiner) and some wrong (Shirley Sherrod), but he didn't care either way. Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war. Breitbart used those tools without qualm or regret, and he inspired a cohort of young conservative journalists to do likewise."

All of which leads Frum to conclude that Breitbart's legacy is a "poisonous" one. He achieved success through a "giddy disdain for truth and fairness" and his politics were "inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas." He was a public figure and should be judged by his public actions, even if "the obituary cannot be pleasant reading."

...

And this from: http://blog.bleacherreport.com/

Breitbart was most famous for media stunts that were based—there is no other way to say it—on lies. In two of the three most famous controversies he played a role in, videos were edited to make it look like something was happening that was not. Breitbart then attacked the people in those videos for doing things that they appeared to have done, but had not.

This led to political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow to tweet, incisively, “So if Breitbart is really dead, his legacy is such that no one entirely believes reports of his death.”

That’s not the best legacy for a journalist, though I couldn’t tell you whether Breitbart would accept that job description.

Breitbart was the founder of BigJournalism.com and other sites, and was most famous for his involvement in controversies surrounding the non-governmental organization ACORN, U.S. Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod and Rep. Anthony Weiner.

Breitbart rose to fame after a video on his site showed ACORN workers apparently helping a pimp make arrangements for his underage prostitutes. The organization was eventually forced to close. Sherrod, who is black, was forced to resign after Breitbart posted a video of a speech she gave to the NAACP in which she appeared to say she refused to do her best to help a white farmer who needed help when she worked for a nonprofit organization.

Both videos were edited in such a way to create those illusions, neither of which were accurate. Sherrod, who had really been telling the story of when she learned to move past race—she ended up helping the white family save their farm, and the farmer defended her during the controversy—later sued Breitbart for defamation.

Breitbart’s role in the Weiner controversy, which came after the other two, was more straightforward. He got hold of sexually explicit photos the congressman had texted to women not his wife, and Weiner eventually resigned from Congress.

Whatever you think of Breitbart’s politics, take a lesson from the reaction to the news of his sudden death. Though his most recent “journalistic” coup checked out as true, the initial reaction to reports of his demise was to assume it was another Breitbart falsehood.

Credibility is something you earn one story at a time. But once you give people a reason not to believe what you say, just one time, they’ll hang on to it forever. Once you lose your credibility, you’ll go to your grave without it.

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“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - John Steinbeck