Andrew Breitbart is dead

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Conservative bully and agitator Andrew Breitbart, as you surely know by now, died earlier today "unexpectedly from natural causes."

He was 43.

However much I loathed the man, and I certainly loathed him a great deal, I do not wish here to speak ill of the dead. He was what he was, to the detriment of civil discourse, to the diminishing of conservatism, and to the worsening of American democracy.

And let us not forget that he himself did speak ill of the dead, just as he spoke ill generally. What goes around, comes around.

Still, there is sadness in death, including in Breitbart's, and one feels for his loved ones. They are not to blame for who and what he was.

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One may not wish to speak ill of the dead, but honesty demands it sometimes. This is so very true in this case. As David Frum wrote:

And this is where it becomes difficult to honor the Roman injunction to speak no ill of the dead. It's difficult for me to assess Breitbart's impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous. When one of the leading media figures of the day achieves his success by his giddy disdain for truth and fairness -- when one of our leading political figures offers to his admirers a politics inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas -- how to withhold a profoundly negative judgment on his life and career?

How indeed.