On Breitbart’s Death: Why Do They Do This?

So today we get the news that Andrew Breitbart has passed away.  I’ve never actually met the guy, indeed only corresponded with him once, after an interviewer implied he was an alcoholic, and just asking a few follow up questions about that.  He wasn’t in my orbit, so much as in the orbit of people who are in my orbit, if that makes any sense.  I mean it is no great disclosure to say that Patrick Frey and Mandy Nagy are friends of mine.  I know Patrick is in shock, and I suspect Mandy is, too.

And it is shocking.  He wasn’t shockingly young to die.  I mean at 43 you are definitely starting to get the warnings about diet and exercise, and so this isn’t like a twenty year old ball player dying, but it is still on the young end of the spectrum.  But it was still kind of out of the blue, and that is shocking.

And I think it is hard to believe because... you half expect him to show up on Red Eye tonight and explain that this is just a massive prank on everyone, like they suspected when Andy Kaufman died.

And of course like clockwork you see the ugly side of all of this.  You know it without me saying it, but apparently many on the left couldn’t help but dance on the grave of Breitbart.  I mean, look, I am not above dancing on the grave of a dictator.  I was positively overjoyed when Kim Jung Il died, even writing “may you roast in flames you evil son of a bitch.”  But he was a dictator, a tyrant, and well... even my state flag advocates for the death of tyrants:

But all Breitbart was, was a political enemy.  Not a tyrant but just a guy who engaged in speech some didn’t like.  And because of that, many on the left are cheering his death.

I am not going to quote this ugliness to you.  I mean if you have to look, you can find it here, here, here and here, but really do you need to look?  Do you have any doubt what kinds of things they said and will say?  Of course not.  It’s all “yippee! He’s dead!  A person I disagree with is dead!”

Yes, yippee a wife is without her husband.  And his four young children are without a father.  And friends across the country break down in tears:

And the predictability of this ugliness—dancing on his grave before it is even dug—robs me of anything to say.  It’s already been said in other instances where famous conservatives (or libertarians as was the case with Breitbart) have died, or been diagnosed with dread diseases.  And moreover when people have said these kinds of awful things, other people pointed at it and denounced their ugliness, so even that part is predictable.

So we know what they are going to say, and they know we are going to report it and denounce it and it is going to make them and the movements they represent look bad.  And they do it anyway. They know it is going to hurt their pet causes, but they still do it anyway.

And all one can conclude is that they can’t help themselves.  They feel so much joy at his death that even knowing it will hurt their cause, embarrass any publication they work for, and generally convince decent people that they are cretins, they have to do it anyway.

And maybe I am wrong in a way for not recording and reciting the vile things they said personally.  After all, as Jonah Goldberg said in that interview: “One of his favorite pastimes was to retweet all of the hate that people threw at him because he considered it a badge of honor.”  So somewhere up in heaven right now, Breitbart is checking his holy twitterfeed and smiling at all the hate being spewed at him.  And maybe the best tribute to him is to publicize this spewing of hate.

But I don’t have it in me to do that right now.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.