Andrew Breitbart was reportedly in talks with CNN to do a show with Anthony Weiner, the Democratic congressman who resigned last year after Breitbart exposed multiple messages and sexual photos the congressman was sending to girls online.
Weiner was my favorite congressman as I always thought he was honest even when I disagreed with him and I admired his passion, his personality and his willingness to jump right into the lions den and debate the issues and confront his ideological opponents.
I felt exactly the same way about Breitbart as I did about Weiner as a congressman. A show with the two of them would have been code-red levels of Awesome. I am now doubly bummed that Andrew isn’t alive to at least film the first episode. ug…
As usual, he was extremely funny, joking about how he had shaved his stubble and cut his hair after Occupy people said that ‘I look like a bum’. In describing an anti-Republican media narrative designed to divert attention from unemployment and gas prices by highlighting social issues, he said: ‘I have four children. I took care of the thing down there. Contraception’s not in the top two billion things in my world.’
He branded MSNBC ‘race card television’ and that if a conservative said ‘gymnasium’ on television, the response would be: ”Gym’ originates in antebellum South Carolina. You’re all racist!’
The next day, he took a car to Detroit airport with filmmaker Ann McElhinney, another speaker and a close friend. As he got in, he told her: ‘I feel awful. I feel really bad.’ She put it down to a hangover.
In the car, they discussed Aaron Sorkin – on Friday night, he had shown her the email from Sorkin – and the prospect of a CNN with Weiner. Breitbart felt that such a CNN show would rehabilitate Weiner but he wanted to ensure it would be serious and would involve going out and talking to real people as well as back-and-forth in the studio.
They talked about Fox News, which Breitbart felt was stuck in the past with too many blonde presenters and outdated formats. One of the journalists he admired most, he said, was Dana Loesch, who worked for him as Big Government and is now also CNN contributor. He described her as a ‘warrior princess’, effective because she was cool and modern.
Breitbart thought that the Left feared people like Loesch most because she was an attractive, engaging, hip person who did not fit the stereotype of dour, fusty conservative. Essentially, the same thing could have been said about him.
One of Breibart’s central arguments was that conservatives had allowed themselves to be excluded from popular culture – film, television, music, even art. He was a central figure in the largely undercover world of Hollywood conservatism.
At the end of his speech in Troy, he said that conservatives would have to endure the race card and the ‘fairness’ card being played against them in the coming election. ‘This is warfare. They’re at war with you and the very idea that you’re still here shows that the Tea Party mindset is alive and kicking.’
Who would have thought that the fiercest and most formidable conservative warrior of all was about to leave the battlefield.
Flashback of the infamous press conference:
