John Macabee lived a trifling and worthless life.
He went around Montgomery daring for somebody to cut his throat.
Last week someone obliged him.
He lived like a dog.
He died like a dog.
Undertaker, claim the body.
Choir sing.
Links:
- Forgetting Steven Gilliard: Andrew Sullivan gets his facts wrong again.
- Politicalprof: On Legacies
3 comments:
Playlist For Podcast #117
http://bit.ly/tgvQ0s
http://bit.ly/zAG6Bx
http://bit.ly/x6L2bm
I posted Matt Taibbi's obituary-piece on Andrew Breitbart's passing on my Facebook page, and a reactionary on my Friends list had an entirely predictable shit-fit about it. I wasted no time in quoting the two best paragraphs from Taibbi's update at the bottom of the blog-entry:
UPDATE: Well done, Breitbart fans, well done! In less than 24 hours you’ve hacked into my Wiki page, published my telephone number on Twitter, called the Rolling Stone offices pretending to be outraged “advertisers” (anonymous ones, who hung up before we could figure out which “ads” to pull), and then spent all night calling and texting my phone with various threats and insults, many of them directed at my family. “Better grow eyes in the back of your head,” was one; “I’m going to take a shit on your mother’s grave,” was another; a third called my wife a “piece of shit like you,” and many others called me a “pile of human excrement.”
Those last ones to me were the most interesting because that quote is lifted directly from Breitbart’s own obit of Ted Kennedy, which like me Breitbart ran just hours after his subject died. So that means the writers of these letters knew that what I did was exactly the same as what Breitbart had done, and yet they still found a way to be unironically outraged on Breitbart’s behalf. I thought: “These people don’t even get their own jokes.”
Hey you both:
That was just a fearsome piece of deconstruction on multiple levels: shooting holes in false Breitbart pity; exposing Sullivan's uncomprehending sense of the actual dialog at play in political blog commentary, and what good citizenship actually means. That lovely letter at the end capped it, as I too send my missives and tantrums into CrooksandLiars, this blog, and others, often with just a tendril-thin hope that anyone is reading. Still, it helps, and when it's late and my abidingly understanding love is asleep, it's often all i've got.
Thank you.
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