"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
A jolly inspirational fellow.
by Smitty (h/t LMA)
Andrew Breitbart will continue to escalate the zeros on the right end of his racial epithet bounty.
Past a certain tipping point, the temptation will be too great. Someone will mix in Dynamite Hack, covering Easy-E: (NSFW)
However, by that time, the bounty will have crossed the Too Big To Fail horizon, and Breitbart will apply for a Federal Government bailout.
What could possibly go wrong?
The first time I met Andrew Breitbart — at CPAC 2007 — the recognition of genius was immediate. Some people are fearful of superior intelligence and others are envious. Admiration is more appropriate, and Breitbart combines raw brain power with a fierce contempt for liberalism and a refusal to be intimidated by power.
This is not to say that Breitbart is faultless or immune to criticism. It is, however, to say with unexaggerated sincerity that he is a man as potentially valuable to American conservatism today as Buckley was in 1951. One quote from the Wired magazine feature:
“They call us tea-baggers. They call us racist, sexist, homophobic, and we are finally punching back. It’s over, dude. It’s over. You think you’re gonna be able to put the genie back in the bottle? It’s over. And if you don’t like my aggression, there are going to be millions more of me . . .”
You should read the whole thing, and see if you notice the little “gotchas” that Noah Shachtman evidently feels compelled to intrude into the article, such as describing Breitbart as a “beefy 41-year-old” in the third paragraph.
Breitbart is over 6 feet tall and probably a lot less “beefy” than the average 41-year-old. Had he grown up in Alabama instead of Brentwood, Calif., some football coach would have spotted him in the school hallway and made an all-state linebacker out of him. His most remarkable feature is his blue eyes, which glare with a luminous intensity whenever he begins talking about anything he is passionate about. Yet Breitbart’s owlish eyes go unmentioned by Shachtman in favor of “beefy.”
Such are the little darts that Gulliver must suffer from the Lilliputians . . .
UPDATE: ACORN Baltimore drops its lawsuit against Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe. (Hat tip: Inside Charm City.)
“It’s all a blur,” Andrew Breitbart said to me in a phone conversation Monday, as we discussed events at CPAC 2010 — the biggest ever and, most attendees agreed, the best. The “blur” effect that Breitbart described is much like the experience of campaign coverage — you go, go, go day after day, with maybe four hours sleep night after night. Between the sleep deprivation and meeting so many people, you lose track of exactly who is who and what happened when.
When CPAC is over, you go through your pockets and find business cards for people you obviously must have met but whose names don’t match up with a face in your fatigue-scorched memory. And when you return to CPAC next year, you’ll be walking through the hotel and pass someone who looks vaguely familiar. You’ll say, “Hey, I know you.” And the other person will say, “Yeah, I think so, but I can’t remember where we met.”
That conversation will continue until either:
This is why it’s important to keep a camera in your pocket at all times during CPAC. My little pink Kodak digital — the famous “Barbie Cam” — captures those faces I might otherwise forget and those incredible scenes that no one would believe were it not for the photographic record. So brace yourself and get ready to be amazed. Continue reading CPAC 2010: Bloggerazzi Photopalooza! →
Q&A — “despicable human being“?
*Update (Smitty)
Stacy McCain: Jason Mattera, a Puerto Rican was called racist by the New York Times after his CPAC talk yesterday.
Breitbart: Despicable but predictable. The political left is frightened because the right has been awakened.
The left’s only tactic is to destroy people personally.
They play the race card because it is all they have.
I feared being called racist, being booed by an audience.
Mattera is going to find out that the left’s political correctness gruel gets thinner every time it is served.
More to come . .
. . . it was hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the MSNBC host meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the pudding in her mouth:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Maddow’s quote:
Just for reference here, when Tom Tancredo talks about literacy tests, that’s what they used in the south to keep black people from voting before civil rights legislation and court rulings put a stop to that.
So the convention opened with a clarion call to bring back the literacy tests for voting. And as you could hear, the tea party convention crowd erupted in cheers at the suggestion, although, to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the white hoods.
Hat-tip to Ed Driscoll, who explains more. And kudos to the brilliant mind who produced this aphorism:
“Breitbart said reporters put all news involving conservatives into two basic buckets: ‘racism and Watergate.”
Amen.
Buckley might limit himself to the two most famous words of Rahm Emanuel, but the Media Matters mouthpiece blathers on for more than 1,200 words, playing the familiar (and dishonest) liberal trick of invoking dead conservatives to disparage living conservatives. This reminds me of something that Buckley once said to a liberal contemporary.
“Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
— Bill Buckley to Gore Vidal, Aug. 28, 1968
The insistence of the Left that conservatives today are not truly conservatives, but rather are “pseudo-conservatives” — i.e., that conservatism has been infiltrated and hijacked by dangerous extremists — is a smear that originated with Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno and was elaborated by Richard Hofstadter. (See my article “Political Psychosis,” which quotes Buckley’s brilliant evisceration of the Adorno-Hofstadter thesis.)
We ought to call such accusations what they are: Propaganda, intended to deligitimize and marginalize opposition to the Left’s agenda. Boehlert may mislead fools (hello, Charles Johnson) but he doesn’t deceive anyone who has studied history. Buckley was himself smeared by such tactics, as were Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and pretty much anyone else who ever dared stand up to the Left.
The specific target of Boehlert’s screed is James O’Keefe, whose Louisiana exploits have resulted in federal prosecution. Andrew Breitbart has defended O’Keefe against the various distorted accounts that have appeared in the media. Hannah Giles is also standing up for O’Keefe, as is Ben Stein. Whatever the outcome of O’Keefe’s legal situation, nothing the Left says is going to cause conservatives to throw O’Keefe under the bus, yet people like Eric Boehlert, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann keep yammering on as if their comments made any difference.
The same establishment media who studiously ignored John Edwards’ sex scandal as long as they could and the same leftist hacks who argued for Bill Clinton’s constitutional right to sodomize interns in the Oval Office now take it upon themselves to tell conservatives we ought to be scandalized because O’Keefe tried a hidden-camera stunt in a senator’s office.
Two words, Boehlert.
Andrew Breitbart gets into a fascinating argument with MSNBC’s David Shuster here.
Via Nice Deb. Much more blog reaction at Memeorandum.
UPDATE: Jill Stanek notes that the Washington Post has already been forced to correct and clarify its first report on James O’Keefe’s arrest.
“David Shuster is the real sin at MSNBC. . . . He’s not a reporter. He’s a small-market shock jock they send to cover hurricanes and car-chases.”
— Ace of Spades, talking about Shuster’s fight with Andrew Breitbart