A hero of the culture war

To be honest, I was surprised to get the invite to Andrew Breitbart's wake on Saturday night. I had never met the man, although we were in a lot of the same places at CPAC this year, and to be honest I shied away from the prospect of introducing myself. Breitbart was a giant on the right, the William F. Buckley Jr. of our times; he started out as "Matt Drudge's bitch" (his words, not mine) before moving on to help Arianna Huffington get the Huffington Post rolling. Somewhere in there, he broke with liberalism and became the bulldog of the South Park Republicans. He was on the case and in the face of the Left everywhere: ACORN and Congressman Weiner were just two of his targets that went down in humiliated flames. He was utterly fearless, facing down crowds of Occupods single-handed, just him and a bullhorn, exhorting the filthy ones to "Behave yourselves! Stop raping people!" Leftists would routinely slam him as sexist, racist, homophobic or all three, to which his reply was invariably "So?" He created the Big sites and more importantly, built a posse of people who had thought themselves alone against the Alinskyite machine of the New Left and their accomplices in the mainstream media. Me? I'm just the Unpaid Blog Intern and Token Papist at Stacy's joint. So when I saw the invite on Facebook, at first I thought there was some mistake. What the heck, I went anyway.

Many of the people in his posse stood up and testified Saturday night. Anita MonCrief, Dana Loesch, half a dozen others whose names I don't recall. Anita's farewell was especially poignant; she was weeping as she recalled how her friends and family all turned on her when she decided to expose ACORN for the grifters, bullies and thieves they were, and only Andrew was willing to reach out to her. Glenn Reynolds gave an impassioned talk about the great deeds Andrew had done, and my boss Stacy asked us to remember Breitbart's wife and children, because while we may have lost a hero, they have lost a husband and father.

I hope I haven't given the impression that the wake was a funereal, dolorous thing; it wasn't. It was a celebration of his life and his deeds, with plenty of video, a slide show of tributes from pundits and politicians and activists, an open bar, and hundreds of people who had come to remember The Man. I'm glad I went.