Gloves: OFF
Mobutu & Gen. Ze'evi, on Gawker:Provocateur, website founder and collector of America's largest wads of spittle Andrew Breitbart died last Thursday morning, when some sentient shred of his cardiac organ kamikazed out of an exhausted sense of justice.
The invertebrate response from journalists was exactly to be expected. Breitbart said, like, bad stuff in his lifetime, but he also married someone and fathered people; once he even objected to anti-gay GOP rhetoric. A malicious career and two milquetoast mitigating facts: It all balanced out, really, at least for the purposes of forced, quailing objectivity. To borrow a gross analogy lustily employed on Breitbart's own websites, if today's mainstream media was penning obits on May 1, 1945, they would have summed up with, "Despite initiating the Second World War, the German leader was fond of public architecture and is survived by his beloved dachshunds."
Other money quotes:
• "In anything other than a throughly beshitted republic, Breitbart's shamelessly pimping a false exposé like this would have seen him broken on a rack."
• Nothing propels you toward the modern GOP's welcoming counterfactual bosom like finding your mediocrity disdained by institutions relying on historicity, evidence and peer review.
• When the far-right is bad at dirty tricks, and can't even frame up some black activists without a messy, drawn-out pushback, it's time to fear for the state of the union, because their every success is indication that they've had help.
• "An Atlantic article published in the wake of his wake commemorated him as a 'punk rock Republican.' Please-George Wallace was more punk than Breitbart. He wore his execrable racism pinned through his nostril, a DIY fascist scaring all the straights in America, hissing tribal exhortations as low and fast as a two-minute Black Flag song. Breitbart craved that liberal respect, wanted to still go to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and so angrily denied the obvious truth: That he relied on the dog whistle as his go-to mobilizing cry."
• "Of course, nobody was asking fretful hand-wringing questions about children when it was time to throw a sop to conservatives and pillory ACORN and Shirley Sherrod. Nobody asked how many children had been given a better life for having their parents rescued from predatory lending. Nobody asked how many children's lives were improved by the good offices of Shirley Sherrod. In the last few days, nobody's asked how many lives will not be affected for the better because we've lost their contributions. And for all the talk of his children, nobody's asked what kind of America they stand to inherit from their father-whether black kids on the playground with them will endure a wider world of fear, wary of a country so easily whipped into a furor of suspicion of them, their motives, their peer groups, their voices."
The Gawker piece easily outvitriols Matt Taibbi's blunt yet grudgingly admiring obit from just after Breitshart died. Which earned him the following:UPDATE: Well done, Breitbart fans, well done! In less than 24 hours you’ve hacked into my Wiki page, published my telephone number on Twitter, called the Rolling Stone offices pretending to be outraged “advertisers” (anonymous ones, who hung up before we could figure out which “ads” to pull), and then spent all night calling and texting my phone with various threats and insults, many of them directed at my family. “Better grow eyes in the back of your head,” was one; “I’m going to take a shit on your mother’s grave,” was another; a third called my wife a “piece of shit like you,” and many others called me a “pile of human excrement.”
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1795137.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.
The invertebrate response from journalists was exactly to be expected. Breitbart said, like, bad stuff in his lifetime, but he also married someone and fathered people; once he even objected to anti-gay GOP rhetoric. A malicious career and two milquetoast mitigating facts: It all balanced out, really, at least for the purposes of forced, quailing objectivity. To borrow a gross analogy lustily employed on Breitbart's own websites, if today's mainstream media was penning obits on May 1, 1945, they would have summed up with, "Despite initiating the Second World War, the German leader was fond of public architecture and is survived by his beloved dachshunds."
Other money quotes:
• "In anything other than a throughly beshitted republic, Breitbart's shamelessly pimping a false exposé like this would have seen him broken on a rack."
• Nothing propels you toward the modern GOP's welcoming counterfactual bosom like finding your mediocrity disdained by institutions relying on historicity, evidence and peer review.
• When the far-right is bad at dirty tricks, and can't even frame up some black activists without a messy, drawn-out pushback, it's time to fear for the state of the union, because their every success is indication that they've had help.
• "An Atlantic article published in the wake of his wake commemorated him as a 'punk rock Republican.' Please-George Wallace was more punk than Breitbart. He wore his execrable racism pinned through his nostril, a DIY fascist scaring all the straights in America, hissing tribal exhortations as low and fast as a two-minute Black Flag song. Breitbart craved that liberal respect, wanted to still go to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and so angrily denied the obvious truth: That he relied on the dog whistle as his go-to mobilizing cry."
• "Of course, nobody was asking fretful hand-wringing questions about children when it was time to throw a sop to conservatives and pillory ACORN and Shirley Sherrod. Nobody asked how many children had been given a better life for having their parents rescued from predatory lending. Nobody asked how many children's lives were improved by the good offices of Shirley Sherrod. In the last few days, nobody's asked how many lives will not be affected for the better because we've lost their contributions. And for all the talk of his children, nobody's asked what kind of America they stand to inherit from their father-whether black kids on the playground with them will endure a wider world of fear, wary of a country so easily whipped into a furor of suspicion of them, their motives, their peer groups, their voices."
The Gawker piece easily outvitriols Matt Taibbi's blunt yet grudgingly admiring obit from just after Breitshart died. Which earned him the following:UPDATE: Well done, Breitbart fans, well done! In less than 24 hours you’ve hacked into my Wiki page, published my telephone number on Twitter, called the Rolling Stone offices pretending to be outraged “advertisers” (anonymous ones, who hung up before we could figure out which “ads” to pull), and then spent all night calling and texting my phone with various threats and insults, many of them directed at my family. “Better grow eyes in the back of your head,” was one; “I’m going to take a shit on your mother’s grave,” was another; a third called my wife a “piece of shit like you,” and many others called me a “pile of human excrement.”
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1795137.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.