One can only read on in silence at the latest essay by Ross Douthat at the New York Times titled The Scholar and the Rascal. In it he compares the public careers of the staid scholar and Conservative public intellectual James Q. Wilson to that of Mr. Andrew Breitbart. Jay Rosen was so impressed by it that he tweeted about the virtue of the essay, as an example of conservative opinion worthy of attention. Mr. Douthat can be praised for one reason, but a very important one, the sheer audacity of his well timed post mortum propaganda in service to the rehabilitation of the reputation of the heedless moral/political nihilist Mr. Breitbart. Although it is hard to think of the act of comparison as audacious, it is the disparity between the public careers of the chosen protagonists, that makes his act of comparison in service to the rewriting of history, of a hasty but politically necessary political rehabilitation, using the white wash of rhetoric, so effective and for that reason very dangerous. The tradition of manufactured political hysteria in it's modern iteration goes back to Nixon, McCarthy, Roy Cohen and their allies, although separated by time, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Their allies in the press Walter Winchell and Matt Drudge and many others, served as verifiers of the necessary propaganda assertions, although not based in any verifiable actuality. Congratulations to Mr. Douthat are in order, he has quite effectively inaugurated the public rehabilitation of the career and person of Andrew Breitbart, whose tool kit included libel, slander, prevarication, exercised without remorse or compunction, truly a monument to the bastard god of American Careerism and his twin Narcissus.

American Litterateur