I woke up this morning to the now familiar shocking news that Andrew Brietbart was dead. The Drudge report is my home page, and when I saw some text with his picture there I got severe cognitive dissonance. I had just seen in the hotel copy of USA Today that Davey Jones had died, and to say the least I was not expecting that the same had happened to the 43 year old Andrew Breitbart.

I thought of writing this after seeing a piece at National Review Online, “My Dinner with Andrew.” I’m not home now, so I can’t check, but I believe it was about three years ago that I met him. I had an e-mail relationship going with another Andrew, Klavan, promoting a non-profit I had started called The Culture Alliance, now the American Culture Institute. I was going to be in southern California and asked Andrew Klavan if he’d like to meet for lunch or something. I knew that he had a relationship with Brietbart and asked him to see if that Andrew would join us. He did!

This was before he was famous, before the national stories he broke made him a darling of the right and enemy of the left. He had longer hair then. We met at a sandwich joint in Westwood where he lived. My impression of the guy was, bigger than life. He talked the whole time. I and the other Andrew got some words in here and there, but you could tell his wheels never stopped turning. I was not at all surprised that he had the success he had, because he had an innate drive that all successful people have.

I was drawn to him because he understood that the liberal hegemony in Hollywood, academia and the media was something that simply could not stand. His firebrand style was not for everyone, but he refused to be intimidated or back down when the progressive wolves howled. There is no doubt that with the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and the Big sites he had a large part in changing the media landscape in America. He also played a significant role in encouraging conservatives and other right minded folks to refuse to be intimidated into silence in culturally hostile professions.

I even met his wife that day, who was walking down that quaint tree-lined Westwood street with a friend and a child or two, I don’t remember. That’s what really makes this heartbreaking, a widow now with four fatherless children, the youngest four, the oldest 12. Any way you look at it, mortality is ugly. Jesus knew; One of the most powerful images in the Bible was when Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus, who in moments he was about to raise from the dead. Death, it just isn’t right!