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Merged Andrew Breitbart has died

Neally said:
He didn't dishonestly edit the video of Sherrod. His mistake was publishing it before reviewing the full unedited version, and he admitted to that.

His great legacy is drawing attention to the fraudulent ACORN organization. Thankfully he accomplished that before his passing.
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Do you have a cite or evidence that ACORN was a fraudulent organization?

He didn't draw attention, he drew a narrative. A fictional narrative.
 
leftysergeant said:
To pretend that the sludgemonster still had something to offer society would not be decent.
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Are we to interpret this statement to mean that you believe those who have nothing to offer to society are worthy of ridicule in death?
 
RandFan said:
Didn't say it was.

  • Claim: Speech harms people.
  • Counter claim: Speech can't harm people, for instance, speech is NOT murder.
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No one here made that counterclaim. This is a straw man. Congratulations, you've defeated a straw man.

I'm not comparing Breitbart's speech with Mansons. I'm falsifying a claim.
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Yes, a claim that nobody made.
 
ravdin said:
Breitbart might have been a dishonest hack, but he didn't fire Shirley Sherrod- the Obama administration did.
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Yes, th e Obama administration has the lion's share of blame in Sherrod's firing. However, Breitbart was the catalyst.

If I frame my neighbor for murder, and the police doesn't do their due diligence and place my neighbor in prison, am I innocent of malice?
 
tyr_13 said:
I'd rather he realized what horrid, hateful, damaging things he was doing and decided to start being ethical in his criticisms and advocacy. It's better if he had grown to understand why what he did was so wrong, and come to feel deep personal regret and pain for the wrong he hath wrought.

I'm not glad he's dead, but it doesn't detract from my criticisms of him and now he doesn't have a chance to address them.
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Yep, pretty much how I feel.

It is interesting to see the wingers getting their panties in a bunch about what some people are saying about Breitbart while having a long history of silence about the horrid things spewing from Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Buchanan, Coulter, Breitbart and their ilk.

Daredelvis
 
Ziggurat said:
Yet not the lion's share of the criticism.
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The Obama administration's fault was to not actually investigate the claims, while acting on those claims. It's a mistake.

Breitbart's actions were purposeful and malicious. They were not a mistake, but dishonest and unethical.

Mistakes can be forgiven. Deliberatly doing unethical things....not so much.
 
thaiboxerken said:
Yes, th e Obama administration has the lion's share of blame in Sherrod's firing. However, Breitbart was the catalyst.

If I frame my neighbor for murder, and the police doesn't do their due diligence and place my neighbor in prison, am I innocent of malice?
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No, and I'm pretty sure we agree with each other on all of these points.
 
Cleon said:
Indeed. It seems that frequently people are less than willing to criticize those on their own "side," even when they so obviously deserve it.
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Very much so- I see quite often in this forum and elsewhere an extreme reluctance to criticize the Obama administration on any point whatsoever....

Whoops! You meant Breitbart, didn't you? My bad.
 
What is so hard to remember about this thread being about Breitbart? If someone was mean about Reagan or didn't criticize Obama, it is probably most useful to call those 'transgressions' out in those places.

Otherwise it looks like so much tu quoque and red herring.
 
You know, the real problem here isn't just Breitbart's smear tactics, but the smear tactics that have become part and parcel of political discourse in this country. Breitbart laid claim to "leadership," but the reality was he was never an actual leader, and this was made evident in his actions.

The same, of course, can be said of anyone from ACORN, to MoveOn.Org, to Al Franken on the left to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter on the right. I expect leaders to actually lead, rather than engage in the exact same tactics they deplore in others. The only thing Breitbart offered was a particular style of verbiage that managed to appeal to a lot of folks on the right, not only in the general public, but within Hollywood. This would include a number of fairly prominent names, and even a few who are less prominent for whatever reason.

I'm trying like hell to be reasonable, here, (hence, I suspect, the reason everyone seems to be ignoring everything I write... Oh, well.) I don't think it's appropriate for anyone to be dancing jigs over this man's grave. But, damn it, for him to claim he was upholding any kind of journalistic ethics at all is insulting on the face of it. Sherrod's case was only the most blatant among these, and the reality that the mainstream media moved at such a glacial pace to correct the injustice levied against this woman only seemed to embolden Breitbart. Just a quick breeze through his sites leaves you wondering if the idea of fact checking was something he missed in all his journalistic training. (Assuming he had any past the high school paper. His degree is in American Studies.)

You cannot claim it was "just words." His words defamed a woman who by all accounts was innocent of what Breitbart claimed. And, yes, while it seems unfair to harp on one incident, the reality is that to one degree or another, this was his MO: Pick a small stone, nurse it to the size of a boulder, and start tossing it at anyone he disagreed with. His targets included not only Al Gore, (and for that matter, anyone who dared to suggest there was any truth to anthropogenic global climate change), HBO, George Soros, (who, at one point, Breitbart accused of being a co-conspirator in the Holocaust)... You name it, if he had a beef against them, they were in his crosshairs.

I will be the first to say that Sarah Palin got a raw deal, but I'm also the first to say there's no way in Hell I'd ever vote for her. She's an intelligent woman, and I've learned to underscore that as we've tried to put our own business together here at Casa De Roadtoad. No one can be an idiot and run a business.

But the reality is that she is unqualified based on her actions and demonstrated understanding -- or lack therein -- of how the world works. I've lived in Europe, roughly seven years, and I have a better understanding of how they're going to view her than she does. You can't afford that if you're going to run for the highest office in the land. (Mitt Romney, take note. You're there, too.) This self-imposed naivete, acceptable in the church pews, viewed as the behavior of a respectable Christian woman, is not going to fly when you're confronting hardened thugs like the Assad regime, or Kim the Nuke Kook. Hillary Clinton understands it, and she's managed to earn a degree of respect in her role as Secretary of State. (Should she be president? I probably wouldn't vote for her right at this juncture, but things change.)

Breitbart and his crew launched a knee-jerk response to HBO's Game Change, and while I have no doubt there are those who say it's fiction, it bears mention that there's little argument on that: IT'S HBO, DUMMY! It's a DRAMATIZATION! It's not supposed to be precisely factual!

And if you have any question about that, remember that someone made a TV movie about the run-up to 9/11! Bill Clinton didn't exactly come out of that one looking presidential.

Breitbart came across as mean-spirited, hateful, and cruel. I read his site out of an obligation to get the other side, but you had to double check every little thing you read to avoid missing something, or to find out what Big Hollywood or any of the other sites had changed. He wasn't honest in what he did. And that was wrong.

Period.

It doesn't matter if you're on the right or left, when you alter facts to fit, you're wrong.

He was not a journalist. He was a blogger. His venomous spew was more akin to William Randolph Hearst, Yellow Journalist than Woodward and Bernstein. He wasn't simply content to destroy someone: He wanted to uproot the totality of their work and plant his own noxious weeds in their place. That he succeeded at all is not due to his work ethic, his skill, his "courage," but it does seem to be more in line with slack habits of the average reader, failing to accurately parse what has been posted, and to learn from their own mistakes of believing Breitbart's words.

I'm sorry he's gone. He should have learned from his errors, and now he won't. Then again, there's more evidence that he never would have. And that's sad.
 
mhaze said:
Excellent topic and thread for liberals to show their true colors on, apparently. But is not just local posters on JREF.

From the excellent blog www.Instatpundit.com

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_142244f4fbbcb3dd2a.png[/qimg]

Twitter Hate: The Left’s Breitbart Memorial. Retweet all the nasty stuff they say — it’s what Andrew would have wanted. He liked to expose these people for who they were, rather than who they pretended to be. He continues to do that even in death.

And reader Jonathan Rubinstein writes: “The outpouring of ghoulish and sophmoric hatred at the death of Andrew Breitbart is a warning to us all that the remaking of America is not a conversation over coffee in the late afternoon. The real struggles that are ahead have hardly begun. Politics is ruthless and the failed political class will not go quietly. The disgusting comments are a tribute to the decline not of civility — there has never been much in America — but the complete disintegration of self-respect. We will engage, we will remake America, we will miss Breitbart but there will be many more joining the struggle.”
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Do you really want to go down this road? I've been reading stuff about the living and dead on Free Republic, The Blaze, etc. that would make Pres. Reagan vomit.
 
Maybe the sludgemonster knew he was never going to be more than a punchline for jokes in history classes, so he made up a scandalous tape and then offed himself so nobody could challenge him because we are not supposed to speak ill of the dead, including the evil ones like him.

Or maybe he offed himself some that it would be hard for the people he has wronged to make any recovery against his estate.
 
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