Another of the DIsconnected - Disconnects

While the snow blew hard outside today, I managed to be productive and streamline some day to day, week to week, month to month bike business drudgery into a less haphazard process.  As I get deeper into the actual business part of running a retail business, I find I want more information with less digging.  Today, I designed my own spreadsheet to help me do that.  Call it an education in spreadsheet basics (courtesy of my loving and dear wife with the CPA - uh, this plug is absolutely necessary if I want her help in the future).  The new twist on the information I was hoping to find brought a deeper understanding of financial aspects I need to be paying better attention to.  It is as if I peeled back one more layer of this onion.



The process was making my head ache.  I took a few breaks with some short walks around the largest theme park in the World, the wild kingdom of the Interweb.  Again I made the mistake of visiting a political forum I used to do battle in.  I made no comments, I just lurked.  I noticed a thread about Andrew Breitbart.  Guess he died.  The reaction to his death was certainly partisan on this forum.  The brainless members from the Liberal side were  unsympathetic.  This of course fired up the righteous indignation from the brainless members of the Right side of the forum.  They were shocked and insulted that one of their heroes would not even get any respect in death.

There is no group I know of in recent years with a better ability to disconnect from the activities of their membership better than the Right side.  Of course all groups have this tendency, but it seems the Right does it 100% of the time.

Previous civil decorum would have found everyone on both sides politely keeping their mouth shut or at least muted when a standard bearer bites the dust.  That was then, this is now.  There is no longer any civil decorum left in the political arena.  No respect for privacy.  No respect for the truth.  No respect for the dead.

Sleazy purveyors of half truths and innuendos on the Right have found their way into our consciousness and soured what other truth might actually be out there.  While both sides have their experts in this kind of disinformation, it is the Right in recent years who have set the bar so high.  There is even a news network that does not even blush when caught blatantly playing fast and loose with the truth.  They actually seem to pride themselves in their ability to twist facts to fit their message, painting themselves as noble Davids struggling to overcome the gigantic Liberal Goliath.

One of the heroes of the liar's brigade from the Right was Andrew Breitbart.  He was responsible for much of the hate and discontent that has deepened the divisions among us.  Anything on the Left side was fair game to him and any method was fine as long as it worked against the Left and for the Right.  Respect for the dead was not even in his playbook.  On the Day Ted Kennedy died Andrew was quoted:

"(Ted Kennedy)  was a villain, a big ass motherfucker, and a prick."

"Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement"

When asked about his comments, Andrew replied:

"Boy, POLITICO missed my best ones."

Hmm.  Tell you what you ethically challenged Right Wingers who have a false sense of indignation over disrespecting the dead - get over yourselves.  Andrew Breitbart made his own bed, he now gets to lie in it.  If one has a tendency to dance on graves, his friends should not be surprised when others dance on his.

Breitbart's passing brings up in stark detail just how disconnected the Right is from what they say and feel compared to how they act.  Breitbart himself was one of their shining examples.

The fallout from his less than complete video portraying Shirley Sherrod as a racist forced her to resign from her post as Georgia State director of rural development.  By editing out pertinent parts of the video, she came off looking like a racist, thus ruining what had been the fine and noble career.

Andrew's response to accusations that he lied with this video and in other campaigns he has undertaken, and I paraphrase :

"Show me one instance where there are provable lies."

Apparently lying through omission is not lying.  Or he is saying that since he did not get caught legally, he did nothing wrong.  Either way, it is this kind of spokesman the Right seems so enamored with, they let them get away with it.  Yet the Right feels in no uncertain terms, somehow they solely inhabit the ethical and moral high ground.

Andrew Breitbart has done nothing noble to deserve his place on some political pedestal.  Certainly he was a passionate loyal supporter of the Right Wing cause.  But his methods make him nothing but an ideological hack who had no moral compass other than defeating the Evil Left, who he thought was anyone with a progressive thought in their brains.

As you can see, I had nothing good to say about Andrew Breitbart.  I am not sad he has died.  I am not glad he died.  But I won't miss him.  And if he is indeed as hard nosed as he came off on TV, he won't care what I think.  I often harbor liberal thoughts.

Later..................................