Breitbart’s Last Laugh

Breitbart’s Last Laugh The Weekly Standard

I woke up this morning to about ten emails from journalist friends asking if our mutual friend, Andrew Breitbart, was really dead.
“Really” was the operative word.
Some meant it in the traditional sense: Is it possible for the human inferno that Breitbart resembled to have actually been extinguished at age 43, leaving his elegant wife Susie and his four beloved children behind?
Several, however, meant it as in: Is Andrew really dead?
Many of us didn’t know if we could trust the announcement, thinking this could be another Breitbart caper, as he always had two or three in his back pocket.
By way of greeting, I used to ask Breitbart what kind of evil he was up to.
“Most kinds,” he’d say, gamely.
So one could easily have envisioned this being the latest Breitbart media stunt: Fake your own demise, go missing for 24 hours, thus encouraging all your ideological adversaries to bleat and fume and make asses of themselves just to prove what kind of sonsofbitches you were up against.
Let the record show that tasteful blogger Matt Yglesias came through like clockwork, nearly getting ahead of the Los Angeles coroner’s announcement by crowing:
“Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.” (Well done, Matt! Perhaps you could pass your thoughtful sentiments on to his fatherless children, since they likely don’t follow you on Twitter. Prick.)