The spate of death threats against members of Congress in the wake of the health care vote has prompted Andrew Breitbart and his cadre of “journalists” to construct their own alternate reality in which threats of violence are exclusive to the left, and all allegations of conservatives making threats are either fabricated or the dirty undertaking of liberal "agents provocateurs" seeking to discredit the Tea Party movement. Now Breitbart has taken this same shtick to the pages of the Politico, and made a fool of himself in the process.

Politico's Kenneth Vogel and Jake Sherman interviewed Breitbart for their piece this morning on the politics of death threats:

Media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart responds that conservatives “are on the receiving end (of threats and intimidation) every single day, but haven't made anything of it because they know that the press isn't going to be sympathetic to their cause and they don't have a coordinated strategy to try to malign protestors.”

Breitbart's various websites have taken a leading role in challenging threats reported against Democrats and highlighting those leveled against conservatives. And last weekend, he offered a $100,000 award to anyone who could prove claims by African American House Democrats that they were called racial slurs by tea party protestors at a Capitol Hill protest before the healthcare vote.

One of his websites also posted a video showing one supporter of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid menacingly telling his compatriots to “get (Breitbart) out of here or I'm going to jail today,” and others throwing eggs at a bus emblazoned with “Tea Party Express” as it passed through Reid's tiny hometown of Searchlight, Nev., en route to a Saturday tea party rally in the desert just north of Searchlight.

Breitbart also provided POLITICO a threatening email he said he received after speaking at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference, in which the writer posited “theres (sic) nothing wrong with you that a well aimed M 16 couldn't solve” and threatened to “silence your ass forever.”

The email has been forwarded to federal authorities, Breitbart said, asserting “I am not trying to make a big deal out of that ... I am just trying to show that this is what is happening. They are trying to enrage their followers and it's working.” [emphasis added]

So Andrew Breitbart declares that conservatives (unlike liberals) just don't make a big deal over the death threats they receive and certainly wouldn't alert the press, and then immediately alerts the press to a death threat he received, all the while maintaining that he's “not trying to make a big deal out of that.”

After all, what better way to not make a big deal out of something than to give it to reporters working for a major political media outlet?

As for his claim that he's “just trying to show that this is what is happening,” that's a bunch of garbage. We already know that it's happening, and it's deplorable no matter who it happens to, be it Andrew Breitbart or Eric Cantor or Bart Stupak.

John Avlon of the Daily Beast, quoted earlier in the same Politico article, neatly summed up the poisoning effect behavior like Breitbart's has on our political climate:

“The fact that we can't get clear condemnation of death threats against Congressmen without partisan caveats is a sign of the sickness in our politics right now,” he said.

The author of a 2005 book on the power of political centrism and a former speech writer for ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Avlon said “neither side has a monopoly on virtue or vice. There are unstable individuals at both ends of the political spectrum.”