The True Tale of 'Rain Man' Andrew Breitbart and His Sean Penn Fantasies

Formerly-mustachioed conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart is a white wine-drinking manic nutjob who fantasizes about Sean Penn and hangs out with Kurt Loder. Does that make him a secret liberal, or just a resentful, incoherent mess? Let's ask The New Yorker!

Is there anything left to learn about Twitter Warrior Andrew Breitbart? Rebecca Mead got to hang out with him for a profile in The New Yorker, which weirdly enough still exists even though Breitbart took down the institutional left back in February. And basically, she found out the same thing that Slate and Wired did when they profiled him in March, which is that Breitbart is an irritating obsessive-compulsive lunatic who was lucky enough to be born just at the right time for his hypermania to make him a lot of money on the internet instead of getting him institutionalized (not that we know anyone like that).

But at least her article doesn't have some horseshit "How Andrew Breitbart Will Change the Internet Forever" spin! Plus, it's got some fun new-ish facts about Breitbart's secret socialist tendencies. Here are some things Mead learned about our favorite social butterfly:

  • Breitbart thinks of himself as just like "one of those Idaho guys saying, ‘You're not taking my land'-with a gun, on my porch." Where does he feel most like "one of those Idaho guys"? Why, at the Bowery Hotel, of course, where he drinks white wine with Kurt Loder and Greg Gutfeld.
  • Breitbart fantasizes about hanging out with Sean Penn: "I'd hate him, I'd fight him. He'd fight me, he'd get in some punches, I'd get in some punches. We'd drink some more. At the end of the day, we'd agree to disagree. And then I'd punch him again."
  • Breitbart identifies with Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man:"I had been watching the news wires like Rain Man, like a savant. The first five years I did it, it was embarrassing. It was like a private problem that I wouldn't really want to share. But then when ‘news aggregation' and ‘new media' started to become buzzwords, and people who knew something about it started to seem important, some of the shame went away."
  • He'd "take a bullet" for Rush Limbaugh: "Not to my heart, or liver, or any important organ, but to, like, my right shoulder, if it would miss an important artery."

There you have it: Andrew Breitbart loves wine, celebrities, hanging out in Manhattan, and the internet. He should come work for us!

[The New Yorker; pic via Getty]