If you tuned in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you probably caught El Rushbo talking about Andrew’s new book. Rush reminds us that Andrew, yes, Andrew Breitbart, “was a big lefty until he heard me.” Me, meaning…Rush Limbaugh.
By the way, great news! Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World has been hovering between #1 and #2 on the Amazon Bestseller’s List in Non-Fiction, and between #10 and #12 Overall. Congratulations, Andrew!!!
Andrew Breitbart sits down with FOX News’ Sean Hannity on April 18, 2011 to discuss his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World,” released April 15, 2011. It wasn’t all just book conversation though…you’ll have to watch it and see!
John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book. It’s a fun interview and a great read!
I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?
Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.
When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.
I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.
So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.
Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….
Oh, the tragedy of my life.
(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?
KURTZ: Let’s start with the obvious question. Why did you not ask Eric Holder in that interview about this former Justice official’s allegation that a case against the New Black Panther Party was dropped because of racial politics?
SCHIEFFER: Well, it’s certainly a question that is a legitimate question to ask. And basically what happened was this all really became a story when the whistleblower came out and testified that he’d had to leave the Justice Department and so on. And, frankly, had I known about that, I would have asked the question.
I was on vacation that week. This happened — apparently, it got very little publicity. And, you know, I just didn’t know about it.
I mean, you know, God knows everything, but I’m not quite that good. Every once in a while, something will slip by me. And in this case, it just slipped by me. If I’d have known it, I would have asked about it.
This is, of course, Howard Kurtz interviewing Bob Scheiffer on Reliable Sources.
Bob Schieffer marginalized the DOJ/New Black Panther controversy first by not asking the Attorney General about it, and then again with his phony “it got very little publicity” line. Of course “it got very little publicity,” Mr. Scheiffer; you’re the guy in charge of publicity! When a mainstream media authority whines that something wasn’t covered in the MSM, it’s the definition of a circular argument. (more…)
The David Weigel saga continues to stagger on, becoming ever more intellectually incoherent. Not only has Weigel written yet another story about himself, this time for Esquire, but Ezra Klein of the Washington Post — the man who recommended Weigel for his short-lived job there — has also come out with another piece, largely argued along juvenile tu quoque lines that wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year logic class. If Weigel and Klein are the best young talent the Post can find, then things are even worse with MSM journalism than we thought.
More seriously, over the holiday, both the Washington Post, in the form of its ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, and the New York Times, in the person of media critic David Carr, both weighed in, with the result that the line between real journalism — in the form of straight reporting — and opinion journalism is now more blurred than ever. If ever readers deserved clarity on this increasingly important issue it’s now, and yet both establishment papers just fell on their faces.
Why? Because they don’t know what to say. Instead, these apologists manage to pretzel themselves in contortions worthy of the Cirque du Soleil while trying to explain to their readers the fine distinctions, the nuances, between a reporter acting as a reporter and a reporter acting as purveyor of opinion, i.e. either bien-pensant leftist conventional wisdom or the youthful exuberance that attends the re-invention of the wheel.
When someone says “journalist” do you have a picture of a fedora-sporting, cigar chomping, agitator of jaded mien and independent mind, a man stubbornly outside the political establishment looking in and eyeing it all with suspicion? Do you get a flash of a writer that stands in opposition to entrenched powers, one looking out for the Little Guy?
If so you’ve been watching too many black-and-white moves from the 1940s. Today, “journalist” simply means an extension of the Democrat Party. And now even the book parties held so “journalists” can launch their latest paean to liberalism are bought and paid for by leftists, the Democrat Party, and their affiliated operatives.
To disabuse you of any old-fashioned notions you still might harbor about the days of The Front Page, on June 9, Washington Post star reporter Ceci Connolly had to cancel her appearance at her own book party when it became common knowledge that the whole thing was being paid for by a public relations firm run by Democrat operatives. The event was bought and paid for by Blue Line Strategic Communications, a public relations firm run by Democratic communications strategist Michael Meehan and former Senate Democratic official David DiMartino. Most recently DiMartino was a Sen. John Kerry staffer and Meehan worked as a senior staff member in the Senate for years.
So much for the idea of “independent journalists.” (more…)
The day before election day 2008, when all political commentary was flowing toward the candidates running for office, I used my column space to write a heartfelt thank you to President Bush (“An Election Day Note: Thanks, President Bush“).
At the time even Republicans were using every trick in the book to distance themselves from the 43rd president. Even before the Florida recount of 2000 I told Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund that the Democratic Party — then led by the Clintons, John Podesta and a team of Whitewater-to-Lewinsky era smear artists including Sidney Blumenthal — would use President Bush as an example to Republicans as a thorough payback for Impeachment.
Florida was a sign of things to come as the left recognized that Bush’s friendly “uniter-not-a-divider” persona could easily be turned on its head. Ted Kennedy’s rejection of bipartisan spirit after he and Bush crafted the “No Child Left Behind” legislation foretold how all Democrats, save for Sen. Joe Lieberman, would treat the 43rd president: with graceless contempt. (more…)
Michael Kinsley, the former editor of Slate, once defined a gaffe as what happens when a politician inadvertently blurts out the truth. But what about when a card-carrying member of the MSM does the same thing?
David “advisor to presidents” Gergen is perhaps the most conventional of the conventional-wisdom purveyors in Washington. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman, every word that comes out of his mouth is a cliche, and that includes “the,” “but,” and “and.” Almost nothing he says is ever original, insightful or thoughtful, although he delivers his empty phrases in a professorial honk that seems to convey authority. If you want to know what everybody else within the Beltway is thinking, Dave is your go-to guy.
So that’s why this clip from last night’s debate between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley, competing in a special election next week for the open Massachusetts Senate seat, and moderated by Gergen, is fascinating. Watch it first, then we’ll discuss:
It’s not the Kennedy’s seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat. It’s the people’s seat.
If, against overwhelming odds, given Massachusetts’ political proclivities (number of Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation: zero), Brown can wrest the open Senate seat from Ted Kennedy’s cold, dead hands, he’s not only going to send a message to the nation that Obamacare is doomed, and probably the Democrats next fall as well. He’s also sending a message to the Democrat-Media Complex. (more…)
I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It felt like a scene from a movie that conveniently ties plot points together when two critical characters in the storyline share a moment of implausible significance – where the intrepid reporter finally runs his target to ground.
So at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.
I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.
“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.
Bertha Laughed heartily. ”No,” she said.
“Really?” I pushed.
“No. One hundred percent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange. (more…)
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...