Andrew was on a radio show only a few days ago – I think it was Dennis Miller – talking about a variety of things, including his work for Arianna Huffington to help create the Huffington Post.
He talked at length about Media Matters and what a horrible person David Brock has become. At the time I my reaction was “I wonder if in a few years he’ll be the next David Brock”.
My tingly senses suggest there is more to this story than we know at this point, but also unlikely we will ever know.
Michael Savage and Breitbart have become friends over the years and his take on this unexpected death will surely provide some insights.
I looked back and now see that Andrew was the guest host for Dennis Miller last week. He was the host, not the guest.
Family and friends insist Andrew died of natural causes at 43 but I can’t help thinking about his CPAC speech a couple of weeks ago in which he said he had videos of a college-age Obama which would come out between now and November. (I am usually quick to turn up my nose at conspiracy theories.)
The Midnight Radio guys were just talking about their interview with Breitbart back in January when he said he was really tired.
The reason my antenna was up from last week’s guest hosting for Dennis Miller was he was really unloading a lot of personal information about his relationship with Arianna Huffington and David Brock and doing it in a way that suggested he didn’t care about the consequences. It sounded like a final data dump in retrospect.
His father jumping in immediately and saying his death was from natural causes suggests that either he had been diagnosed with a medical problem that was likely to cause instant death (Aortic Aneurism comes to mind) or Breidbart went on a walk with his dog at midnight not intending to return home. Given his frontal attack on Media Matters, it is within the realm of possibility that David Brock has damaging information he was about to release. But that’s all speculation. There are really big forces at work and when one of the big opponents of the Obama administration keels over and dies, it’s worthy of some scrutiny – at least toxicology reports before announcing a cause of death.
Orson Bean was Breitbart’s father in law. To be honest, I’m surprised to hear Orson Bean is still alive. Orson Bean was a regular on TV game shows in the 1960s – my memory without double checking with Wikipedia (!) is he was on to Tell the Truth, What’s my Line and probably Password. Bean was born in 1928, which makes him 84, plus or minus a year.
I was shocked to hear the news. I had just watched his CPAC speech a few weeks ago and looked forward to all of the stories he’d break in the future. I think a lot of us in the movement idolized him for his tenaciousness and fearlessness. In the tea party n-word case, he didn’t back down. He kept repeating over and over again that it did not happen. He provided all the evidence available, and then he offered $100,000 to anyone who could prove him wrong. Of course he was never proven wrong. We have a lot of great minds on the conservative side, and while George Will and Charles Krauthammer might engage Occupy rhetorically from behind a TV chat table, they don’t actually engage the opposition. Andrew’s passing is a great loss to the movement.
Connecting a few of my random dots.
Now knowing that it was Orson Bean who announced within a couple hours of his death that he must have died of natural causes gives me no comfort in many ways.
I’m getting extremely cynical about the entire political process (more than normal). I’ll never get over the idea that Mary Matalin could marry and be the mother of the child of the man who was trying to destroy her candidate. It’s just a big game to them. They don’t really believe in anything.
Maybe Breitbart was sincere and really did have life changing events. Of maybe he was just leading lemmings off the cliff for entertainment.