Breitbart and the little Dick Nixons isn’t the name of an indie band, though I’m reserving the name just in case I decide to start one. I don’t mean to equate Andrew Breitbart with Richard Nixon, since, while Breitbart and Dick-O do share a propensity for smears and making up dirt, Nixon was actually intelligent and a person of consequence (mostly negative). Though Breitbart and some of his cohorts in the conservative snooping and sabotage business, manged, using spycams and slimey editing to cause the media to collapse on ACORN and Shirley Sherrod like a lazy-ass ton of bricks, they don’t have much in the way of accomplishments.

Breitbart was able to cultivate a Linda Trippish snitch who followed and reported on Anthony Weiner’s private life, and this puts him more or less in the lineage of Luciane Golderg, a former Nixon knee-capper who tutored Tripp in how to snare her “friend” Lewinsky. Breitbart and his ilk, like James O’Keefe, the wormy, post-pubescent who dressed like an outtake from a 70’s Blaxpoitation flick (there seems to be a real pop culture lag for these folks, their up-to-dateness at the general level of Ukraine or maybe Lagos) was able to get footage suitable for malicious editing that would damage ACORN.  The peculiar thing about our little conservative friends, mostly white, is that they find organizations providing assistance to the urban poor, and organizing them to vote in order that poor Americans might have some miniscule influence on government policy affecting their lives, to be way too much for them to stomach, all those poor minorities voting and everything; though these same conservatives find the de-facto ownership of the American government by non-taxpaying corporations and hedge fund managers somehow God’s plan for the country.

I say beware only as a warning to elected officials vulnerable to being Weinerized, and less directly to that too gentrified segment of liberals who have failed to note that today’s conservatives stopped several decades ago being their philosophical oppenents in the body politc, and began a fundamentalist holy war against Democrats, liberals, science, the Founder’s vision of equalty and modernity itself, among other quaint things of value.

Though Republcans  are not strangers to scandals of the lubcricous kind (Livingston, Hyde, Chenowith, Gingrich, Vitter, Cox, Craig, Foley), theirs have come to light as the result of involuntary encounters with law enforcement or at the hands of cohorts, subordinates, aides and associates. Actively digging for sex dirt and spying on private lives is largely the purview of our right-wing, having no moral, philosophical or temperamental inhibition when it comes to doing such. You may say to yourself, “I would be ashamed to capitalize on minor matters or minutiae. I would feel petty. It would violate my own principles to engage in invasions of privacy and digging into sexual lives.” Well, your conservative friends won’t be saying that to themselves. So never be so naïve as to believe no one would be so petty or shameless.

Though today’s righty smear artists, snoops and slanderers are to some extent the sons and daughters of Nixon’s Plumbers, they’re probably more in the vein of conservative worker bees during the Clinton era Mellon-Scaife rent-a-scandals, where hot shot conservatives recruited lackeys to find and employ even lower species to spread dirt and lies. So if you’re an elected Democrat, a progressive organization, a prominent liberal or engaged in humane or liberating work of any kind keep your eye out. Like the little woodchucks in the Geico commercial they’re out there looking for wood to chuck {or that’s been tweeted).

Just as an aside, one needs to mention that Andrew Breitbart is showing a somewhat indordinate interest in Weiner’s genitalia. If you’re a straight man carrying around pictures of another man’s Man 0’ War on your telephone, I have some reservations about you in matters of creepiness.

As for the original Weiner, while I might say sending photos of one’s package to internet correspondents falls outside my own definition of suave behavior, the fact of the matter is that it remains a private communication, and likewise Weiner’s physically sexless partying was personal rather than governmental. So the outbreak of shock and sanctimony oozing out of the punditocracy and the pussilanimous character of Democratic hopping on the righteousness bandwagon is a reprehensible spectacle indeed. How ‘bout a little boldness on the side of privacy and the sanctity of the private domain, especially in matters of sexuality. Let’s see what’s inside your computer

But in the meantime, you liberals, when it comes to Breitbart and the Little Dicks, don’t be expecting peace in our time.