Surprise! Breitbart's Big Government doesn't understand pop culture

Just add it to the laundry list of topics Breitbart and his bloggers know nothing about.

In case you missed it because of the holiday, you really should read the Christmas Eve take-down that the Los Angeles Times' Christopher Knight delivered, as he thoroughly dismantled Breitbart's recent inanity about a White House tree ornament.

From Knight: [emphasis added]:

On Tuesday, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government blog got its knickers in a twist over one of the Obama White House's myriad Christmas trees...The blaring “EXCLUSIVE” led with a blurry photo of a decoupage Christmas ornament adorned with the face of Chinese Communist dictator, Mao Zedong.

“Of course, Mao has his place in the White House,” Big Government wailed about the [Great Christmas Ornament Scandal], taking the Obama-as-socialist meme out for a yuletide spin.

Except, it wasn't exactly Mao. It was Andy Warhol's “Mao.”

The image is one of a very large series of silkscreen paintings and prints the late Pop artist made of Mao. Warhol's parody transformed the leader of the world's most populous nation into a vapid superstar -- the most famous of the famous. The portrait photo from Mao's Little Red Book is tarted up with lipstick, eye-shadow and other Marilyn Monroe-style flourishes.

...

The precise source of the Warhol ornament is not known. But Warhol's Maos are in art museum collections from coast to coast, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago (whose painting most resembles the ornament image) and both the County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum has several.

Oh, and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, the National Gallery of Art has 21 different versions of Warhol's “Mao.” Twenty-one. Wait until Big Government bloggers find out about the Communist takeover of the National Gallery.

A random White House Christmas tree ornament, of unknown origin, featured a world famous image of Mao as interpreted by Andy Warhol. But because Breitbart and his bloggers are so clueless about pop culture and art (they seem to have no idea what Warhol's “Mao” is), they wrote up a blog post in which they proudly advertised their ignorance. Again.

Behold “conservative journalism.”

UPDATED: Read Breitbart's incoherent response to Knight, here.

UPDATED: More Breitbart incoherency, also in response to Knight. Gee, think the LA Times hit a nerve when it pointed out that Breitbart and his crew seem to have no understanding of pop culture?

UPDATED: Breitbart earns bonus points for hypocrisy while swinging wildly in his Knight rebuttal. Breitbart claims the LA Times is losing so many subscribers because it's so darn liberal:

And that in its grand transparency multiplied across a newsroom is why you and yours are in perilous financial straits. Every lost subscriber has a poignant straw that broke the camel's back story on how their local paper went too far to the left too shamelessly.

The punchline? Breitbart's a columnist for the Washington Times, the right-wing daily that has so few readers that it's basically in the process of going out of business. Breitbart writes for a money-losing, and thoroughly failed daily newspaper that has hemorrhaged more money (in its blind partisan pursuit) than perhaps any other daily in the history of American publishing.

Yet he lectures an LA Times journalist about “lost subscribers”? Thanks for the laugh.

UPDATED: Wrote Andrew Sullivan re: the latest right-wing car wreck:

Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site does an expose on commie, homo, trannie themes buried in three White House Christmas tree ornaments. It's like McCarthyism revisited as farce.

UPDATED: In response to this critique, Breitbart posted even more senseless ramblings. Maybe he's still smarting from the collapse of the ACORN story. (Or the Gladney story. Or the they're-praying-to-Obama story....)

UPDATED: Or maybe Breitbart just hates the Christmas season.