I'm Not Celebrating Breitbart's Death, But I'm Not Mourning It, Either

I see a lot of liberal bloggers who are talking about Andrew Breitbart this morning and just turning themselves into pretzels to say something nice about him. On the one hand, they can't believe a guy so young died. On the other hand, they don't want to be like some of those people on Twitter who are celebrating Breitbart's death. Whether they genuinely think it's just too bad that someone so young and so public could just up and die of natural causes at the age of 43, or whether they just don't want to be seen by conservative bloggers as sinking to the level of a lot of conservative bloggers, I don't know.

I wonder if even half of the conservative bloggers who are aghast and dismayed at the number of tweets celebrating Breitbart's death called for the same kind of respect for the dead they're calling for now when Ted Kennedy died. I know Breitbart wasn't. He was on Twitter showing the same lack of decorum and being the same kind of asshat conservatives are whining about right now.

I'm not celebrating the death of Andrew Breitbart, but I'm not going to miss this guy, either. I didn't know him personally, and I'm sorry that people who did and who liked and loved him lost someone they were close to. He leaves a wife and kids behind, and that's tragic.

But he also leaves behind a legacy of public hatred. He leaves behind a Twitter page that is 8% conservative talking points, 2% chortling with glee over the pain of Occupy protesters, and 90% answering every hate tweet he gets with more hate. Andrew Breitbart created a lot of hate in this world: his legacy is insults, divisiveness, anger, lies, and hypocrisy.

So I'm not going to mourn the guy. I'm not even going to feel bad that he's dead. I'm not going to say that the world is smaller because we lost an important conservative voice and all that nonsense, because I never considered him an important conservative voice, just a loud one. One who made it his life's work to destroy progressives, misrepresent them, ridicule them into silence, and call them terrorists. If you're a progressive or a liberal, how losing that is something to mourn, I don't know.