Frum on the Breitbart mess. I have two initial thoughts on the whole thing:
2 initial thoughts:
1. BWA HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA BWA HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA AHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHA
2. How exactly do you fuck this up? Look folks, it's not rocket science. It's not complicated. It's not difficult. Want to prove what all the real 'muricans knew all along? Go find an actual tape of an actual NAACP member saying something that is actually controversial. Post it. Make a big deal out of it. Let Hannity jerk off to it. Whatever. But do it real. It shouldn't be too hard. The NAACP is basically the Tea Party of the left. You can find a loon with a big mouth there, probably without trying all that hard. There's a lot of tape out there on these guys (they're a bit more historic than the Tea Party-Americans) and if you're going to scan 25 years of tape, you should be able to find something, anything. It'll change the subject from the ass kicking you just received from the NAACP within 2 days you go back to worrying about Real 'murican stuff like fucking unemployed people and closing up them there boarders.
Easy, right?
Apparently not. Because in his whole schtick to show how the media is a bunch of lying liars who lie about lies, Breitbart says "screw it, I'm too lazy to actually find a good wingnut to yammer over, I'm just going to doctor a tape. My intended audience is too stupid to figure it out anyway".
And the result:
This isn't a big political deal. It really isn't. I guess in terms of the narrative, it is a broken defense against the racism charge, and a broken prong, in light of the Mark Williams incident ultimately just serves to deflate the entirety of the defense. That's short lived though. Scandals like this lose context in mere moments. It just makes candasses like Riehl and Malkin who are back to "YEAH NOBODY EVER GAVE ME A TAPE OF THE TEA PARTY YELLING SLURS" seem like total fucktards for the time being. I guess it does make the faux outrage over the journalist fiasco seem a little less poignant.
It doesn't change things for Andrew Breitbart. There's nothing earth shattering about the idea that he's a second rate info pimp. And, he is correct in his assessment of his audience: they are too stupid and largely too partisan to synthesize what this means and it only proves that when they complain about 'media bias', their real complaint isn't that the media is biased, it's that it's not biased in their favor.
But it is endemic of just how far off the rails the 'conservative movement' has become when one of their folk heros does this shit and everything is okey doke. I seem to remember the rightful hubub over Rathergate, the AP shopping pictures from Israel, and numerous instances of media dishonest. The right blogosphere did not contribute much during the Bush era. They didn't contribute to the idea market, they didn't provide substantial funding for candidates, and they didn't win debates. They did fact check the media watching for shit like this. Awfully hard to do that when the biggest media offense in recent memory wasn't the mystical left wing media conspiracy, it was right there at home directly from one of their champions.
Frum says:
When people talk of the "closing of the conservative mind" this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people — everybody can be narrow minded — but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact.
When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.
Instead, conservatives are consumed with a new snippets-out-of-context uproar, the latest round of JournoList quotations. Here at last is proof of the cynical machinations of the hated liberal media! As to the cynical machinations of conservative media — well, as the saying goes, the fish never notices the water through which it swims.