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Andrew Wept
You may recall the recent Hewitt v. Trump thread, where the silver-haired lickspittle of the Cocktail Circle Corps demanded that Donald The Brave tell him the atomic weight of Boron and other gotcha! questions. Trump, to his credit, noted that he would get up to speed on the periodic table, and know more about the elements than Hewitt ever would – possibly by finding the best scientists in the world, hiring them, liquifying their brains, and having the rich, brilliant slurry injected directly into his cerebral cortex.
In the comments, I noted that the outcry after the interview would result in Hewitt’s banishment from the ranks of True Conservatives, because he was elite, squishy, and no doubt part of a plan to resettle the entirety of Kansas with Mexican gang members on the orders of the Jewish Masons. (They secretly control the regular Masons.)
On cue, breitbart.com obliged with a piece: HUGH HEWITT, GOP DEBATE QUESTIONER, SIDES WITH ESTABLISHMENT, NOT VOTERS. The comments are … well, go read them, and you’ll be slapping your wallet to re-up for Ricochet. (Did you know Michael Medved is a Jew? He is.)
Disclosure: Hugh is a friend, and I am a regular guest on the show. I am also a daily listener for 15 years, during which time I enjoyed many appearances by a fellow who also held Hugh in warm regard. Guy by the name of Andrew. Hugh was a big booster of Andrew, and whenever he had a new project or made the news or just wanted to pop off, Hugh had him on.
I knew this Andrew too. A capital fellow. Last time I saw him was in my kitchen at the end of a party; he was the last to leave, and he was talking about the toll it all took. The man had endless fearless energy, and it never occurred to us that sometimes it must have been damned hard being Andrew. I miss him to this day, and I know, if he was still around, he’d be on Hugh’s show saying whatever he wanted to say, and if he said something that clashed with something Hugh said, Hewitt would say hold that thought and keep him over for the next segment.
Andrew left a brand. His heirs soil it. A good site, once. Now it’s a toll house on the edge of the fever swamp. I wish they’d change their name, but of course they won’t.
Without it, what would set them apart?
Image Credit: “Andrew Breitbart” by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Published in General
Whither, James Delingpole?
There is a large ugly element to Trumps support that many of his more fair minded supporters either refuse to acknowledge or twist themselves into pretzels to defend.
Thank you, James. Nobody could have said this as you did.
James,
From your post it appears the commenters are doing the soiling. That’s less of an indictment of Breitbart.com than of the public comment business model (as you allude to with the reference to re-upping for Ricochet).
Guess it’s time to write Lileks the RINO out of the book of True Conservatism…
People, I think, tend to understandably valorize Andrew’s fighting spirit, while overlooking Andrew the strategist. I miss the latter more than the former.
Sadly, many organizations that continue to bear their founders’ names bear little resemblance to their origins after the founder dies.
Normally, I’d agree with Mr. Lileks but a secret cabal of Jewish masons led by a certain Catholic might explain Ohio State’s recent football success. Nothing short of conspiracy seems plausible as to the cause.
I remember Andrew’s early work as being bare knuckled as G3 highlights and also detail oriented. I assume he would’ve called out Mr. Trump on details or the lack thereof.
I also think he would call out the current PTB in Congress on broken promises and lack of will for a bare knuckled fight. That is just personal conjecture on my part.
My wholehearted support as to why Ricochet is so unique with its membership model and CoC.
Thanks for the heads up, James. I’ll be on the lookout for these Jewish Masons (and Hugh Hewitt too).
Too much emphasis on Jewish Masons, not enough on Jewish Electricians or Jewish Plumbers. Just because people don’t lay bricks doesn’t mean they can’t have some share in controlling the world. It takes all kinds.
I used to regularly enjoy Andrew’s Big sites, but since he passed they have become vehicles for pushing so much advertising traffic I find them avoidable. That aside, Breitbart was renowned for consuming comments, as a means of taking the pulse. Doesn’t mean he agreed with them, but he considered himself better informed for his efforts.
In our busy lives we can hardly be expected to consume the comments for most sites, or even posts within sites. However, I cannot imagine Breitbart having stood behind a post on his site that referred to Hewitt as an establishment figure, based upon the questions he asked Trump. I thought a couple of names a bit obscure, but at least had a passing familiarity them and Trump should have been able to demonstrate a passing familiarity as well. I could be wrong, but I would suspect every contributor or reader of this site to have at least a passing familiarity with most, if not all of the names Hewitt threw out. That hardly makes Ricochet a den of Establishment iniquity.
I never find anything interesting there so I rarely go.
I think we’d all be better off if we stopped listening to radio talk shows and going to political sites.
Except this one, of course. It’s different.
Brilliant.
I met him only once. Like a body snatcher he vacuumed oxygen from each person lucky enough to be in his company. He appeared to take great joy in converting that energy into action. That oxygen was necessary to sustain his laser light show leaving us as empty pods, yet grateful for the experience.
No one compares.
Amen to the Cat in the Hat.
I suppose that some Trump supporters would like to think of their hero as being this year’s Andrew Breitbart. In this they are truly delusional. Andrew Breitbart was brilliant. Righteous Indignation may be my favorite political/autobiographical text. In it he clearly mapped the course of his conversion from the left to the right. He demonstrated an understanding of the origins of the modern left and its tactics. He had a demonstrable knowledge of history, and, he was a fighter who understood Sun Tsu’s dictum to know your enemy.
Donald Trump presents himself as a fighter, creates straw dogs which he demolishes with his heavy-handed bluster, but never really gives details. The reason is that he completely lacks any knowledge of those details. I seriously doubt that he could give a coherent description of how he made the migration from a sort of New York center leftist to the new savior of the conservative movement. Details are something that Trump isn’t big on.
I peruse the Breitbart site on a daily basis, but rarely read beyond the headlines. Their attacks on Podhoretz and Goldberg, two particular favorites of mine, particularly the very unflattering picture they chose of John looked much more like something from a left-wing site than a site attempting to be the standard of the right. Unquestionably, Andrew would have wept. Then he would have gotten angry.
James, in all fairness, Hewitt began losing me when he got nasty with caller after caller if they didn’t pony up to his fiction that he was something other than a committed Romney-booster in 2012. *Which is fine*, so long as you’re not lying and being insufferable about it. Glenn from Dallas called him out on it one day, and Hewitt of course wasn’t nasty enough to go after Glenn. But there it was.
Breitbart was magic — he was the Tom Bombadil (if I may) of the conservative warriors. I wept in Afghanistan when Chowdah! passed away — I knew something was up when Duane had to finish the show. I entertain myself by doing my impression of Hitchens aping you doing Sullivan, (thickly:) “Yess, well, you see, that’ss just like you then, isn’t it, Hugh.”
I wore the Hughniform.
Hugh did a great service finding and exposing the Z visa, and I’m grateful. We’ve all seen Hugh when he goes on a tear after somebody, whether ethnomusicologist, or bogus Republican pollster, or puffed-up candidate marked for needling. Or Andwoo Suwwivan. It’s sophisticated, but not subtle.
I hope that lady in Colorado is doing well — Miss “Chowdah.” Well look at the time.
I’m with BDB on Hugh going so gaga over Romney that it was a turnoff. That said, no one conducts a radio interview as well as Hewitt. I’d compare him to Peter Robinson, but I cannot imagine the posturing and hand gestures when listening to a Hewitt interview the way I can from watching Peter conduct UK interviews.
Nice. Keep up the Tolkien references and I may start actually liking you…
Thanks, James. Well put.
Ummm, Gen. McClellan was notoriously afraid to fight and refused to shed the blood of his soldiers. He was the opposite of a bare-knuckled brawler. He was an establishment type that preferred social status and political feting to actually going after the enemy.
I too, found Righteous Indignation brilliant. Expository political autobiography at its finest. The Bretibart.com that is today is, I think, a shell of what Andrew had originally envisioned. I visit from time to time: Milo’s stuff is always entertaining there. But I found RI a highly influential book. It capitalized on the nuances of the Left usually left absent by those on the Right; he made a brilliant case why the left is so wrongheaded.
I had a similar experience in shifting from left to right. I was an ignorant liberal in college preoccupied mostly with social issues, as most of them are nowadays. Conservatives seem much more rational, objective, and fact-driven in their convictions, most of which revolve around values we could all get behind: self-reliance, temperament, dignity, economic sensibility, patriotism, family values, and an adherence to faith that I find refreshing and completely absent on the left. The State is God.
Pretty sure you missed the point of that comment.
Rob speaking in 2006, Cathy Seipp the tributee, Andrew in the background.
Two years later we were at one of those hush-hush get-togethers that mysteriously made it to the front page of The Hollywood Reporter. I turned a corner and suddenly I was standing with Rob, Drew Klavan, and Andrew, who asked “So, why is Gary Sinise stepping up and doing all this?” Charlton Heston had just died, so I made a guess: “He wants to be the new King of Conservative Hollywood”. Little did I know that I was speaking to the next king of conservative Hollywood.
James laments that Breitbarts legacy has been coopted by unhinged wingnuts, GGG says that Andrew’s invitation for take-no prisoners approach attracted wimps like Gen. McClellan. Yeah, I find the point incoherent.
No, James laments that Andrew’s invitation for take-no prisoners approach attracts people with no sense of tactics or strategy.
The heirs to Andrew Breitbart strike me about the same as the rash of talk radio hosts who think that by aping the Rush Limbaugh script they can be stars. Both Breitbart and Limbaugh are (were) far smarter than most give them credit for, and their act is not nearly as easy to replicate as most people think. I even find Hannity mostly unlistenable, and he’s probably the best of the Limbaugh clones.
Hewitt is a different fish altogether: in place of monologue + caller reaction (the Limbaugh formula), he hosts an older style interview show, and frankly, he’s the best at it on the air right now. Most of the reason why he’s as good as he is comes from the fact that it’s obvious that he prepares for each discussion that he has. He has his question list, and has obviously thought of several avenues to pursue depending on the answers that he gets. At the same time, he’s flexible.
Ultimately, the people who have trouble with Hugh are those who think that they can wing it. I posted a few months ago following one of these interviews that Ben Carson needed to do his homework, because it was painfully obvious that he hadn’t from the way that Hugh asked his questions. He too had a little hissy fit over “gotcha” questions, but after a hiatus has returned to the show and has been much better prepared. Same may well apply for Trump.