Andy, Did You Hear About This One?

When I first heard about Andrew Breitbart's untimely death the other morning, I thought for a hot second about jumping in with some sort of comment, snarky or otherwise. But then I remembered that for one, he wasn't really on my radar that much when he was alive -- about the most I could tell you about his Big Babywood schtick was that it served to affirm the usual librul conspiracy paranoia jabber, which has been around since Reagan burned his SAG buddies and went Republican.

Worse, Breitbart's sites helped bring failed SNL bobblehead (and borderlinecertifiable retard) Victoria Jackson out of well-deserved obscurity, an offense as nearly as bad as his selectively-edited lynching of Shirley Sherrod, or support of ACORN-busting supapimp/boat groper James O'Keefe.

But I also happened not to be in much of a mood to piss on someone's grave, maybe because Breitbart went young (a year or so younger than me, for that matter), and he left a wife and four young kids. Also, too, I really had to get going to work, and my comedy synapses aren't really firing at 6:30 in the morning. I leave it to better minds to speculate as to why a routinely dyspeptic, overweight, sweaty, professional blowhard might be walking around Brentwood at midnight. He seemed the sort to drag his Lhasa Apso over to the neighbor's lawn to drop a deuce, who knows?

Anyhoo, when you see stuff like this, the "I am Fartacus" dudes (and the occasional dudette, one of them actually fairly hot) engaging in their usual one-handed spear-polishing, you have to wonder what the fuck. It's as if they really think there's a movement afoot by the consumers and regurgitators of the refried chunder the Big sites trafficked in. I mean, it's sweet and all, and some of them probably even think they actually mean whatever it is they're saying.

But propagandists are interchangeable in the modern media field, because there's always another one waiting in the wings, who understands the rules without being told. When, say, Rush Limbaugh eats his final handful of oxy, or Bill-O the clown pops a blood vessel from reading his panels to his illiterate viewers once too often, will they go all Guy Fawkes for them as well?

A corollary to that might be if they think their counterparts on Teh Left would act like that when one of ours drops. We've lost a few, such as Steve Gilliard, Jon Swift, and others, but my recollection of the untimely demises of those folks is that people politely grieved, said a few nice words about the departed, and moved on. It's the most any of us can expect when it's our turn, as it inevitably is.

Bottom line is, there are no "movements" on either "side". There are simply not enough people consistently aligned, day after day after grinding day of this happy horseshit. There are simply clusters of various sizes around various and sundry wampeters, exchanging various bits of foma, convinced that everyone is just as fixated as they are on whatever baroque conspiracies they conjure up.

Not that there is any equivalence, mind you -- I honestly cannot think of a single "leftist" counterpart to the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, O'Reilly, and the rest of them, not in terms of scale, scope, degree of influence, or degree of vituperation. Olbermann manages to conjure up impressive volumes of righteous anger here and there, but he probably wouldn't crack the conservatard top ten with his niche basic cable viewership.

I can at least respect Breitbart for his entrepreneurship, for his innovation in pursuing, say, unique avenues in gaining notoriety. I believe wholeheartedly that a fool and their money are lucky enough to get together in the first place, and that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

That makes things simpler; I don't have to worry about guys like Breitbart or Limbaugh and wonder what makes them tick, it's only business. You just wonder about the folks who not only keep voting over and over again against their rational self-interest, for the people who keep fucking them and their families and their country over, but how they manage to turn that activity into some righteous crusade.

It's almost like watching Juggalos in their natural habitat -- they're so entertaining, you almost don't have the heart to break it to them that the Insane Clown Posse's music really fuckin' sucks.

Update [3/5/12]: As you can see from Taibbi's update, the Fartacus brigade, never the most tightly-glued to begin with, have pretty much lost their shit. How dare he speak ill of the dead, and all. I mean, we are talking about someone who trash-talked Ted Kennedy the entire day or so that he died; without debating Chappaquiddick, one can objectively observe that speaking ill of the dead was certainly in Breitbart's playbook.

They want to have it not just both ways, but all possible ways -- for them, Breitbart was a happy warrior and merry prankster who found joy in dumping on targets live and dead, deserving and not, and as such his death will be a catalyzing element in some sort of nascent groundswell now, which will what -- give us crunchy libruls the ol' what for, and propel the richly deserving and severely conservative Scrooge McDuckMittford Romney into the White House? But heaven forfend anyone flicks Andy any shit on the way out? Okely-dokely then. Maybe I picked the wrong REM (always one of my most-loathed "mainstream" bands) song for the post title; perhaps Everybody Hurts would have been more apropos.

Keep in mind, we're talking about people launching death threats over a few insults. These are the same folks who are always the first responders any time there's a riot in the Islamic world over a couple of Mohammed (PBUH) cartoons.

It is not a talent, so much as a characteristic of petulant fourth-graders, to so consistently dish it out yet be completely unable to take even a little bit of it in return. Now, if some mythical lion of the left decides to fight fire with fire, and engage in wrecking careers with cheap calumny, or tacitly exhorting (certainly doing nothing to discourage) their Borg followers to lob death threats in response to schoolyard taunts, well then we might have something approaching modest equivalence here. One can always dare to dream, I suppose; in the meantime, their poopy-diaper whinging is at least as entertaining as anything on the Herpes Shore, including the extra-chromosome mutant festering in Snooki's tanning bedred-bull-and-vodka sloshing womb.