While commenting over at Phib’s place-out of genuine concern for a blogger I really like and read regularly-I put myself at odds with many members of the herd over there. My mistake-asking Phib what he was doing writing for a sleazebag like Breitbart. The thing is, as I started researching it, in order to better counter some of the more unfounded criticisms, I really got an eye opening about just how truly vile Mr. Breitbart is.
Like Glen Beck, Andrew Breitbart would just be dismissed as a crank, except that a lot of people read him. And quote him. That alone makes him-like Beck-a very dangerous guy. Very dangerous indeed.
Breitbart portrays himself as a journalist-but that’s really a stretch. What he really is, is a fabricator. A person who starts with an intended conclusion and then shape’s snippets of information to tell the story his way. Even though he has been caught out in an outright lie on several occasions, the media still refuses to treat him with the scorn that he deserves.
Breitbart owns several web sites: Big Government, Big Hollywood, Breitbart. com and his newest effort Big Peace. He advertises it as place for meaningful discussions about foreign affairs. That’s really a stretch-especially after one of his writers had the stupidity to compare New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s eloquent defense of religious freedom to Philippe Pétain’s selling out of France to Hitler. Breitbart uses his writers like he uses his websites, to advance a particular Tea Party agenda.
Now that’s fine-he has a right to say what he wants-but he does not have a right to play fast and loose with the truth. Or when that doesn’t work-he just lies out right.
Consider the Sherrod case for example. In heavily edited video clip Breitbart posted shows Shirley Sherrod, then the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaking at an NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia, and stating that she didn’t give a “white farmer” the “full force of what I could do” because “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land.” Breitbart characterized Sherrod’s comments as her“describ[ing] how she racially discriminates against a white farmer.”
The video got big play on Fox and it was used to pummel the President and others as being a racist-the charge Glenn Beck has made and just this weekend retracted. Sherrod was fired from her job.
Only there is a funny thing, when the entire video is viewed-the message of Ms. Sherrod’s speech is 180 degrees out from what Breitbart said it purported. Of course by then Fox News and every other outlet for the mentally impaired supporting conservative causes had ran it and made everyone involved look like dirt. Even when he was cornered about it-Breitbart refused to acknowledge the truth.
For example, NRO’s Jonah Goldberg has said that Sherrod is “owed apologies from pretty much everyone, including my good friend Andrew Breitbart,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said Sherrod’s remarks “were taken out of context … She was smeared by allegations of racism, lost her job, and is now being redeemed by the truth, it seems, the whole truth,” and Fox News’ Glenn Beck said Sherrod “deserves her job back.”
There was of course-no such apology from our boy.
In the hours immediately following Senator Ted Kennedy’s death, Breitbart called Kennedy a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard,” a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.” Whether you disliked Kennedy or not-that is a little beyond the pale-but right in character for this guy.
But then again-what do you expect from a man who trained at the feet of Matt Drudge. As I noted, in an earlier post-you should always be very afraid when an acquaintance says, ” I was just reading on Drudge”. Stand by-you are about to be insulted with some very stupid things. And this was where Breibart supposedly earned his chops.
Most recently-Breitbart has actively gone after Ezra Klein- a pretty good writer who writes seriously and with conviction about the events of the day-placing a “bounty” on his listserv account where other journalists could exchange ideas. Breitbart maintains that it is a conspriacy to slant the news-Klein maintains just the opposite. Klein was forced to shut down his listserv-even though he had done nothing wrong and wrote two very well written posts debunking Breitbart’s hypothesis. First of all as Klein pointed out-the people in league with Breitbart have similar listserves and second-the evidence of a conspiracy is easily debunked. Nonetheless Klein was forced to shut it down to protect his other participants from the kind of outrageous character defamation Breitbart practices.
What is truly sad is that he gets away with it. Apart from Sherrod’s lawsuit-the rest of the media seems blind to his hypocrisy or afraid of it.
And you ask yourself why America has become so stupid and 87,000 sheep people show up for Glenn Beck’s rally about nothing. Well look here-we have folks like Breitbart to blame.