Thoughts on Today's Political Landscape

[smc]

Originally Posted by TracyCoxx

RIP Andrew Breitbart,
you will be missed!

I wish an early death upon no one, but it seems to me that anyone who would miss the provocateur Andrew Breitbart's uncivil, vitriolic, and patently false "contributions" to public discourse is revealing things about herself or himself that I would think that person would want to keep private.

Alex Pareene, writing on Salon.com, categorizes Breitbart's "contributions" quite well:

• Scalp-hunting

Pareene describes this as "the elevation and demonization of some usually obscure liberal figure done in the hopes of getting them nationally shamed and fired." As an example, he cites the Shirley Sherrod video -- which "blew up in Breitbart's face -- and notes that this kind of false demonization is so much more successful when you do it "with dead people, like Saul Alinsky" (whose famous book, notably, is required reading for many of the Tea Party leaders, and not to "know one's enemy" but as an organizing guide).

• The false "proof"

Pareene notes, "It is a sad fact of online publishing that some ridiculous portion of readers only read the headlines and look at the pictures before moving on." He describes how Breitbart's websites exploit this fact: "'OBAMA MARCHES WITH NEW BLACK PANTHERS,' or something like that, goes the headline. The story can?t support the claim. It doesn?t matter. The headline means it?s true for the majority of the readership."

Notably, Breitbart's last, great "contribution" to our political discourse has just hit the streets. It's the video that he boasted would take down the president. In it, Obama -- then the president of Harvard Law Review -- is speaking at a peaceful rally on the Harvard campus in support of Derek Bell, the first black professor at the Law School. The rally was called in support of getting Harvard to offer tenure to black professors.

The full video was shown on Sean Hannity's show on Fox "News" Channel. He had Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak on as a guest. Pollak described Bell as the "Jeremiah Wright of academia."

You see, once you've said that, and counting on no one to pay much more attention, you've got the "headline" Breitbart was after. It's a headline that throws a bomb into civil discourse and upsets real discussion about real issues.

Yeah, Tracy Coxx, you should be very proud of your view that he will be "missed."