Bill Whittle sometimes gets on my nerves (and I don’t even remember why, but whatever.)
But if you haven’t watched his tribute to Andrew Breitbart, please do.
Yeah, you’re probably already sick of these things, but if you never watch another one, please watch this:
He says Twitter killed Breitbart, with an assist from his ever-beeping Blackberry.
Unlike lots of folks praising Breitbart’s bulldog warrior habits-of-being — engaging in hours long RT skirmishes online — Whittle says that’s precisely what led to Breitbart’s extremely premature death.
The very things many grieving people say they will miss most about their friend — his bottomless, Viking-warrior-king-like appetite for food, drink and combat — are the very things that pushed him through the exit.
His lust for life killed him.
If you’re safely alive and looking at all this from a distance, as 99.99999% of us are, that’s what you call “ironic.”
If you’re Breitbart’s widow and four children? I don’t have the words.
I know that if I were his wife, I — being me, after all — would likely be muttering over and over again:
Happy now? Happy now? Happy now?
Addressing myself to my late husband.
And to his cheerleaders as well as his enemies.
In a nation littered with middle aged boys who are surgically attached to their X-box, refusing their many familial duties — including sex — and working just enough to get by, keeping their heads down while they wage-slave their existence away, Breitbart’s work ethic is was a pleasure to behold.
Right up until the second he died.
Having said all that, I reiterate — as I put it on The Source — that Canadian “conservative” males could use more than a little of Breitbart’s American entrepreneurial spirit.
We have all the law-school-grad, careerist hacks we’ll ever need. In fact, we’re overstocked.
And as someone who’s been doing it online for over 12 years and offline for longer — we’re pretty overstocked on pissed off pundits, too.
Following in the footsteps of other American media and cultural moguls, who accomplished this with varying degrees of success — P.T. Barnum, his neighbor Matthew Brady, Lucille Ball (and to a lesser extent, her predecessor Gertrude Berg), Oprah Winfrey, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Adam Carolla and yes, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian — Breitbart created a platform for himself from which he could not be fired.
The secret to Breitbart’s success wasn’t just his possibly pathological disregard for the opinions of others, right or left (he famously broke with CPAC one year and was a keynote speaker there the next…) — but more importantly:
He had “f*ck you” money.
He could take “risks” because, financially, they weren’t really “risks” at all.
I wish (as I said many times during his life) that Breitbart had poured all that energy, clout and capital into a hackproof, libertarian, uncensorious YouTube (for example), instead of just putting up yet another online news-and-opinion site, the existence of which fractured an already finite audience and turns sites like HotAir and the Daily Caller and whoever else into competitors instead of allies.
