Andrew Sullivan’s right on this one; Andrew Breitbart’s offer of $100,000 to anyone who’ll provide him with the contents of private email list Journolist, as I wrote yesterday, is ethically (and possibly legally) beyond the pale: Politics As Total War.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today’s right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It’s about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet’s ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

Read it all here.

Of course, if you agree with Andrew Sullivan, you can count on creepy bottom feeding hacks like Breitbart to write things like this:

Perhaps Sullivan and Charles Johnson should share a townhouse in the bizarro editorial no-man’s land that they both now inhabit.

Hurr hurr!