(I wrote this week’s books lead, in which I review current Republican bestsellers as though they were sci-fi novels, well in advance of the Republican-created hoopla over Weiner’s weiner. But part of the review offers some surprising insight into Andrew Breitbart’s media strategy for propagating this whole kerfluffle. Here it is:)
Breitbart describes himself as a liberal until the Clarence Thomas hearings, which for some reason inflamed his sensibilities enough to transform him into a conservative forevermore. That he chooses such a bizarre crossing point is obviously an error. Thomas, who rarely can be bothered to comment or even ask questions about cases before him, is at best an unexceptional justice and at worst an ethically corrupt one, considering his wife’s dubious ties to the teabagger movement. Why does Breitbart cast as a conservative champion a man who barely can be trusted to show up for work on time? And why is the second biggest moment in Breitbart’s life the moment when Matt Drudge broke the story of the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Get a load of this prose: “It was a triumph for the truth-seeker… Clinton’s carefully crafted media defense was going down, and Drudge was dismantling it as brilliantly as anyone in media history.”
Breitbart crafts a universe where trivia is paramount and important events are ignored. Dan Savage’s essay about licking doorknobs at Gary Bauer’s campaign headquarters exhibits “the vicious actions of a perverse, degraded, and disgusting human being,” but George W. Bush’s WMD lies and the tanking of America’s economy warrant nary a mention. Here is a man who believes the universe revolves around a penis and a judicial slacker, a gnome who huddles for warmth against the rapidly cooling minor victories of the past, even as he imagines himself diving forward into a roiling battle that has no bearing on how Americans actually live.