Righteous Indignation–A Conservative Primer

Andrew Breitbart’s new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!” was released last Friday. If you’ve been following my Twitter feed, you know that I’ve been reading it. I didn’t get a chance to start until Sunday night, and I finished it last night.

This book does two things. It lays out the roadmap for how to finally take down the MSM, or Democrat Media Complex as Breitbart calls it. And it shows exactly what steps the DMC will take between now and November 6, 2012 to keep their power and to keep the Democrats in power.

Those two things alone make the book worth the cover price. If you plan on being actively engaged in next year’s election, even if just by blogging or tweeting, you need to read this book.

But there’s more to the book than just that. Breitbart lays out some of his history, including his own failings and mistakes. He discusses his change from liberal to conservative, and the metamorphosis is similar to that of Tammy Bruce. The left made a mistake allowing these two to escape. They understand the destructive tactics the left uses better than anyone. And they’re both willing and able not only to relate them to the rest of us, but also how to turn the tables and use these same tactics against the left.

Indeed, Breitbart makes the point over and over that we have to treat the left as the enemy and throw out our rules of engagement. We have to take the fight to them, not let them dictate the terms or the field of engagement. That’s exactly how we’ve lost to the left too many times.

I’ve tossed out several quotes on my twitter feed, but this might be my favorite.

That’s why it never crossed my mind whether I should play fair. Fair loses.

We have to stop worrying about being “the good guys”. We have to start worrying about winning. The Tea Party has been pretty good about that, but we can do better. 

Breitbart also lays out a bit of this history of the socialist/progressive movement in the United States. Note that if you pay attention to Glenn Beck, he’s been saying a lot of this same stuff for a couple years now. The difference is that Beck is so focused on minutiae that you have to watch him every day for a month to get anything like a complete picture, and you get one from Breitbart in a single chapter.

Finally, the behind the scenes information on his work with James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles to bring down ACORN is positively delicious. I remember when all of this was happening, and reading that when BigGovernment.com opened it was going to open with something huge, and I remember each day after the first video wondering what was coming next, but reading why and how it all came together as it did was incredibly fascinating.

Those are most of the things I enjoyed about the book. There’s a great chapter on the Tea Party as well. But I did have a couple minor quibbles, one of which he addresses in the Epilogue (not sure I’ve ever seen a non-fiction book with an Epilogue before, but I digress). The first is that he doesn’t discuss Shirley Sherrod. Ok, I can understand that as there are ongoing legal battles regarding that topic. So I’ll give him a pass on that one.

But he also doesn’t address Mary Landrieu. Now, you could argue that there’s no need to do so since the topic was only on the periphery of the Big sites, and that it was completely an issue with James O’Keefe. However, the left used Landrieu and Sherrod to tar Breitbart and O’Keefe together and to try to taint the ACORN videos. It seemed to me that it deserved at least a mention for that reason.

But that’s a minor quibble, and I certainly understand the reasoning for not including it. Overall, this is a great book, and I am sure that I will be referring to it often over the next 16 months or so.

Buy it! Read it! Use it!