Andrew Breitbart: A Whirlwind Dies

When a whirlwind dies, there is a sudden quiet. Los Angeles this morning is deathly silent.

Christian Adams doesn’t usually phone me at 6:20AM. What’s this, I thought grumpily, ringing him back on my iPhone. And now I sit hurriedly typing in my office where Andrew Breitbart, a man many years younger than I and twenty times more energetic, would sit with me half a dozen years ago or more when we we first met, typing out his end of the Drudge Report while gossiping non-stop and downing a soda.

He was astonishing even then. He would say to me, “You know, bloggers don’t know how to write headlines.” He was right, of course, and I wondered if he was talking about me. I was one of those bloggers, struggling to get a few hundred hits against the massive traffic he and Drudge were generating. Among his many talents, Andrew was a brilliant headline writer.

And then came awesome entrepreneurship, spawning web sites the way guppies spawn babies — a man born of the Internet and born for it.

No more. Andrew Breitbart dead at 43.

My condolences to his wife and children.

My condolences to the conservative world.

My condolences to America, which has lost one of its truly great patriots. Andrew, more than anything, cared about his country. He worked for it non-stop. And now he has given his life for it.

RIP.

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(Continuously updated: Breitbart’s enemies celebrate on Twitter.)