Month: March 2013

Who Andrew Breitbart Was

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P.J. O’Rourke encounters Andrew Breitbart at the
Manchester, N.H., Radisson Bar, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012

In May 2007, I interviewed Andrew Breitbart while he was working — doing his shift as an editor at the Drudge Report — at the D.C. offices of Reason magazine, and described how he worked and why he did it:

His computer pings with every new e-mail. His cell phone rings with calls from friends. Distractions surround Andrew Breitbart. Yet he remains focused on the latest happenings from around the world, flowing into his laptop computer via a half-dozen wire services and other news sources.
A self-described “news addict,” the 38-year-old Californian sips a Mountain Dew as he scans the latest headlines and talks about his journey from being a stereotypical Generation X slacker to being on the cutting edge of the 21st-century information revolution. . . .
“I’m a news addict, news aficionado who, instead of watching ‘Sesame Street’ growing up, would watch the local news. And I’d watch the 4:30 news, then I’d watch the 5 o’clock news, then I’d watch the 6 o’clock news, then I’d watch the national news at 6:30. . . . I was such a voracious news consumer.”

You can read the whole thing. There have been multiple tributes to Andrew today, the one year anniversary of his shockingly sudden death at age 43. Professor Glenn Reynolds has a round-up at Instapundit.

It’s important to remember, I think, that Breitbart was a self-professed “news addict” — not a politics addict or still less a Republican Party addict, which is what his enemies would very much love to demonize him as having been.

Any intelligent “news addict” (and Breitbart was extraordinarly intelligent) who approaches the business from an outsider’s perspective cannot help but observe the herd instinct of the media, and resent it: “Hey, look, big media — over here! There’s an interesting story you missed because it doesn’t fit your prefabricated template!”

 That’s really what it’s about. The fact that the big media’s herd instinct, insofar as it touches politics, is demonstrably about 90% partisan Democrat or ideologically liberal — that’s the niche Breitbart was filling, and also the source of his Righteous Indignation. But it’s wrong for the animals in the media herd to make that political difference a motive to smear Breitbart as they did during his life and as they have continued to do after his death.

Whose bias is the real problem here?

To assert that Breitbart’s liberal critics hated him for something other than politics is to tell a lie, just as it was a lie for liberals to smear the Tea Party as “racist.”

At some point, the cumulative weight of such dishonesty becomes a negative verdict on the credibility of those who tell these lies. And the Democrat-Media Complex, by its incessant partisan cheerleading, becomes responsible for the policy failures of the party whose propaganda it delivers as if it were Neutral Objective Fact.

Well, I need to hurry up and post this before midnight, and I’ll come back later to extend it with updates and links to other tributes, but I just had to get that off my chest first. Right now, frankly, I’m kind of depressed by this news:

A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” . . .

You can read the whole thing, and all I’ve got to say about it is, damn. Just . . . damn.

UPDATE: Rick Bulow makes an important point:

Like Andrew said at CPAC last year, “If you’re not in that bunker because you’re not satisfied with a certain candidate, more than shame on you! You’re on the other side!”

This is a point that I’ve certainly come to appreciate — and I think all of us should appreciate more — in the past year. During the long primary campaign, some conservatives got so into the “Anybody But Mitt” mindset that they simply couldn’t let it go. In the four months since Election Day, there has been an endless round of finger-pointing and told-ya-so’s that haven’t done anything useful toward organizing victory or, at least, staunching the bleeding.

So, yeah — get in the fight, or you’re on the other side.

UPDATE II: At the annual CPAC Blog Bash last year, the National Bloggers Club awarded Andrew Breitbart the “Changing the Narrative” Award — the only award he ever received for his work as a journalist. This year and henceforth it will be known as Andrew Breitbart’s Changing the Narrative Award.

UPDATE III: Dana Loesch remembers:

It was easy to be brave with Andrew around. People drew from his courage when theirs had dissipated. He likened himself to a rodeo clown, of all things. I want to share something for which I’ve never gotten to thank him, which has really bothered me. . . .

You really, really need to read the whole thing. As was said of a great general, he saw the whole field.

 

The _____ Of Things To ____

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by Smitty

‘Tis so sweet to trust in _____
Just to take ___ at his word.
Just to rest upon his ______.
And to know, “Thus _____ the _____.”


I, for one really feel that I’m getting my _____’s worth from my government.

‘He Would Fain Have Had It’

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it. It was mere foolery. I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown (yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets) and, as I told you, he put it by once — but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again, then he put it by again — but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by. And still, as he refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar — for he swooned and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”
— Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2

“President Obama sometimes feels strangely compelled to indicate that he is not the Master of America.”
— James Poulos, Forbes

We have come to expect these protestations of helpless impotence when Dear Leader does not get his way:

“Jessica, I am not a dictator, I’m the president,” he said while speaking to reporters in the White House Press Briefing Room. “Ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say we need to go to catch a plane, I can’t have Secret Service block the doorway.”

The stenography pool known as the White House press corps is busy chiseling his immortal words into stone, even as Obama offends sci-fi fans by confusing the Vulcan mind-meld (Star Trek) with “Jedi mind tricks” (Star Wars). But of course, his apologists would plead Obama’s underprivileged Indonesian upbringing as an excuse.

Did I mention he once ate a dog?

This is how it is with a Cult of Personality: Everything must always be interpreted in favor of Dear Leader. His exotic background — the subject of his best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father — can only be praised and celebrated. One is not allowed to interpret the same set of facts as potential evidence that Dear Leader is out of touch with the people he presumes to lead. Any such interpretation is raaaaacist, as is just about any other imaginable criticism of Dear Leader.

This week, Bob Woodward accidentally joined the hate-mob, and if he doesn’t straighten up, he might get listed on the SPLC map right next to the Family Research Council.

When Obama succeeds (and these are always political successes), his press-corps fanboys praise him as transcendent Lightworker — omniscient, super-human, his powers beyond the capacity of mere words to describe — but when Obama fails (and these are always policy failures) his media hagiographers attribute this to the infinite evil of his enemies. And on those rare occasions when Obama’s policy failures are also political failures, as with the allegedly cataclysmic “sequester” cuts that don’t really bother anyone, his journalistic idolators erupt in a fury of confusion.

“And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”

 

 

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

Rising GOP Rock Star Alert:
Susan Stimpson Brings It

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by Smitty

Virginia is for lovers. . .of elections. There is a state convention in Richmond in May, to select the GOP slate for this November’s races for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General.

The shy, retiring Ken Cuccinelli managed to overcome his introversion and clear the decks for the Gubernatorial race. Attorney General has two hard-chargers looking to carry on The Cooch’s tradition of staunchly defending liberty.

The action, then, is at the Lieutenant Governor level, where there are seven (7) candidates. Last night, there was a forum. Some candidates had surrogates speak, others offered their stump speeches, but there was one who cut right to the chase about McDonnell’s Folly:

It turns out that her other half is a retired Officer of Marines. Having been raised a military brat myself, one can attest that active duty spouses are made of stern stuff. When anyone retires from a full active duty career, it is very highly likely that the first person thanked at the retirement ceremony is one tough-as-nails blessing of a spouse. The chops that held down the homefront are evidenced by her record as Chairman, Stafford County Board of Supervisors. She is clearly packin’ the gear:

  • Cut overall real-estate taxes 3 years in a row, 7 cents below the equalized rate ($11M)
  • Abolished the business tax (BPOL)
  • Reduced the boat tax
  • Zero’d out the Rt 17 tax district
  • Eliminated Falmouth/George Washington District Impact Fees
  • In 2010, 2nd consecutive budget less than the year before (not done since 1965)
  • Rolled back general admin staff to 2004 levels

Her speech was a rousing call to conservative action, covering her record and inquiring just what McDonell was on about with the tax hike. None of the other candidates in attendance went anywhere near that elephant in the room, which was surprising. One would have expected at least the other two in attendance to get beyond their stump speeches and say something, anything about what appears a colossal Left turn.

The position of Lieutenant Governor is substantially a ceremonial one, but an important means of raising visibility. Virginia’s LtGov race this year is an embarrassment of riches: they’re all great candidates, and one wishes a composite of all of them were possible. Such would be a conservative juggernaut.

I’m not certain of all the rules at the May convention, but I guess it’s three rounds, dropping the bottom two finishers, until the final three contestants have some kind of steel cage match to see who makes the ballot. Good times.

Harvard Abandons America (Or: Ted Kaczynski Is Not ‘Anti-Intellectual’)

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What has been well-known for years is now official policy: Conservatives need not apply at Harvard University.

This is really full-circle Back to the Future stuff, because the American conservative movement can be said to have properly begun in 1951 with the publication of William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale, which exposed in detail for the first time the Ivy League elite’s embrace of collectivism and abandonment of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Today’s near-totalitarian hegemony of the Left in academia began as toleration (under the rubric of “academic freedom,” an attitude Buckley rightly described as a “superstition”) of what were then the unpopular beliefs of a marginal fringe of atheists, socialists and other disgruntled misfits. The liberal fetish of “tolerance” made elite campuses a soft target for radicals in the 1960s, and radicalism became dominant in subsequent decades as Marxists undertook The Long March through the institutions.

While the Left had invoked “academic freedom” to defend themselves in  the early years of the Cold War, however, this “tolerance” has been systematically denied to opponents of the Left now that the erstwhile dissenters are firmly ensconced as the regnant arbiters of orthodoxy. In 1987, Allan Bloom surveyed the encroaching nihilism in The Closing of the American Mind and, by 1991, Dinesh D’Souza was able to describe political correctness as a ubiquitous campus phenomenon in Illiberal Education.

Now the staff of the Harvard Crimson sniffs that the university’s critics are attempting “to curry favor with the more anti-intellectual members of our body politic” — i.e., anyone who is critical of Harvard is anti-intellectual, Q.E.D.

There has been a trickle-down effect from the radical takeover of elite academia, in large part because graduate schools of the humanities and social sciences are producing more Tenured Radicals than the faculty of elite universities can employ. Thus, we find Professor Erik Loomis, eminent expert on the gay sex lives of anarchist lumberjacks, struggling to survive on a pittance as an untenured assistant at the University of Rhode Island.

This trickle-down radicalism first came to my attention when Orit Sklar and Ruth Malhotra were forced to sue Georgia Tech to protect their First Amendment rights against a totalitarian “speech code” regime.

Georgia Tech! Radical gays and militant Muslims bullying a Christian and a Jew at Georgia Tech?

My uncle attended Georgia Tech. Being a native Atlantan, I had trouble imagining this engineering school that UGA alum Lewis Grizzard always jokingly called the “North Avenue Trade School” — perhaps most famous for its proximity to The Varisity drive-in — could have been taken over by political correctness. Yet here were Orit and Ruth being terrorized by campus radicals for refusing to accept the administration’s Orwellian speech-code policies. What we have witnessed in American intellectual life the past half-century is a top-down revolution that seeks to impose on the nation a homogeneity of opinion, calling to mind one of Buckley’s cogent observations:

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

Faced with the iron grip of radicalism on the country’s most prestigious institutions, we see that the cherished tolerance of “academic freedom” Buckley so long ago described has been replaced by its exact opposite, as prophesied by Marxist academic Herbert Marcuse in 1965:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Thus, whereas Ortega y Gassett in 1932 had warned of The Revolt of the Masses, we are instead today confronted by the result of what Christopher Lasch in 1996 described as The Revolt of the Elites. David French, the Harvard-educated attorney who defended the rights of Orit Sklar and Ruth Malhotra, reflects on the current situation:

[T]he idea that conservatives who attend Harvard have some kind of “dread of academia” is similarly amusing. No, my conservative classmates and I attended Harvard in large part because we were seeking an academic challenge, because we wanted to experience life at allegedly the best academic institution in the world. We did not bring anti-intellectualism to Harvard; anti-intellectualism was inflicted on us. . . .
While there were some bad days, I simply refuse to believe that we conservatives should abandon an almost 400-year-old American institution — arguably the most important academic institution in the world — to one side of the political, cultural, and religious debate.

Who has abandoned whom, David? Isn’t this rather like chastising Israelis for not supporting Hamas? Could Harvard — which purged Larry Summers as too “conservative” for its tastes — be any more explicit in its hostility to dissent?

Why should conservative parents spend $52,650 a year to send their children to be indoctrinated by the Marxist faculty of Harvard, when they could instead send their children to Hillsdale College for $21,390 a year? For that matter, if bright young people have sufficient confidence in their own ability that they don’t insecurely crave the imprimatur of elite credentials, why not just save all that private tuition money and attend a state university?

It’s hard to imagine anyone dreams of boasting that their child attended Harvard, alma mater of the Unabomber.

(By the way, the pharisaical editors of the Harvard Crimson might notice that I’ve cited the titles of a few books. Anyone care to bet that none of the fanatical ignoramuses have ever read any of those books? Also, just for good measure, permit me to recommend The Higher Education Bubble, by some guy who went to Yale Law.)

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 


The Homophobolicious Flavor of Hate™

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Last summer, during the absurd Chick-fil-A boycott, my teenage son Jefferson coined the word “homophobolicious” to describe the yummy sandwiches. Now the unspeakable terror inspired by The Flavor of Hate™ has spread to the University of New Mexico campus:

A group of liberal students at the University of New Mexico tried their best to get Chick-fil-A kicked off campus because they claimed the eatery made them feel “unsafe.” . . .
Gay students claimed that they even felt threatened by the mere sight of students and faculty carrying bags with the Chick-fil-A logo on them.

KQRE-TV in Albequerque reports:

“Students started expressing to me they felt unsafe to go into their own campus union building,” Sen. Miquela Ortiz of the Associated Students of UNM said. “When they said they felt uncomfortable on campus, I felt it was an issue that I should bring up.”
“Please look at this from a moral standpoint,” said Brittany Arneson, a student against having Chick-fil-A on campus. “Look at the kids that are here that are telling you, ‘I do not feel safe on this campus anymore.'”

We could afford to laugh at this hysteria, were it not for the fact that left-wing hype about “hate” inspires dangerous lunatics to think it’s OK to murder “homophobes.”  Fanatical propagandists who claim to see terrorism in a Chick-fil-A logo are ultimately responsible for the deranged gunman who wanted to kill Anna Maria Hoffman.

(Hat-tip: College Insurrection.)

David Weigel Just Doesn’t Get That There ‘Leadership’ Thingy

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by Smitty

Peddling his JournoList wares at Slate, Weigel reveals a bit of density, emphasis mine:

Republicans have one goal, running through all of these negotiations. They don’t want sequestration to be replaced by tax revenue. Any tax revenue. Forcing the president to swallow $85 billion in cuts this year would do that. They’ve got no obvious alternatives.
But a plan like this exposes a quirk of Obama-era fiscal hawksmanship. Republicans want specific cuts. Some of them—total repeal of Obamacare!—they’ll put on the record. The rest of them, they try to put on the White House. As soon as the “supercommittee” failed and sequestration looked real, it became “the president’s sequester.”

As I was trying to explain to Mataconis last night, #OccupyResoluteDesk can’t play drums and lead guitar at the same time like that, Dave. Barack Obama is either an über-genius uniter, stopping global warming and bandaging all the scraped knees, or he’s a two-dimensional cardboard standee tooling about the country reciting teleprompted gibberish at great expense.

As President, Obama commissioned the Super Committee, and owns its failure, just as surely as he ignored its report, and can’t even turn in his budget homework on time. Because even BHO can’t point his fingers at Congress while using them to type.

So, David, your use of the passive voice in trying to excuse BHO for the debacle is as ludicrous as all of the petty abuse being heaped upon Americans over his incompetence. Admittedly, 51% of the voters are blamable victims, having returned the jackwagon to office in November. But don’t paper it over: this Sequestration is a pure, epic failure that #OccupyResoluteDesk owns, because, while his campaign prowess is beyond question, he couldn’t lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer.

Twitter is a having a blast with this, and I’ll sign off with a few sequestration gags that are getting good circulation:

Dodgeball:

Airplane!:

Blues Brothers:

Outlaw Josey Wales:

Memo From the Lunatic Fringe: LGF Attacking ‘Anchor Baby Malkin’

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Diary of Daedalus shows that a Little Green Footballs commenter got 11 “updings” for this insightful offering:

More fake outrage against our First Lady: Anchor Baby Malkin fails miserably at attempting to mock the First Lady’s “Evolution of Mom Dancing.”
The Obama Derangement Syndrome is more dangerous than syphilis.

Here is the video that inspired the LGF comment:

Leaving aside entirely the epithet “anchor baby” (which leftists have falsely used for years against Malkin, the daughter of legal immigrants), where is the evidence that Malkin was trying to stir up “fake outrage”? She was merely parodying Michelle Obama’s dancing with Jimmy Fallon of “Saturday Night Live.”

Thin-skinned liberals can’t take a joke. And their indignation toward alleged right-wing racists is . . . well, convenient.