Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Tweeters -- Updated

At Big Hollywood, Pam Meister notes, “Roger Ebert Trashes His Own Fans (and Palin) on Twitter”:

If you follow a movie critic on Twitter, chances are you follow him because you admire his ability to critique the many offerings of Hollywood. Unfortunately, if you follow Roger Ebert, you also get endless tirades on greedy corporate fatcats, ”nutjob Teabaggers,” and how dumb Sarah Palin is.

Ebert is, like many liberals, showing his true colors – and they ain’t pretty. His obsession with Sarah Palin and Tea Partiers provides the perfect example. He spent ample time Tweeting about the recent Tea Party Convention, where Sarah Palin was a featured speaker and – gasp – was paid $100,000 for her appearance (which he must now know that she pledged to donate to other candidates and causes).

Ebert makes a number of references to how much Palin was being paid by both the Tea Party Convention and Fox News – a curious fixation considering he built his long and storied career by discussing the work of screenwriters, directors, actors and actresses – many of whom get paid millions of dollars a pop, as do the ”corporate fatcats” at the studios who back these films.

But here, Ebert goes above and beyond the pale, managing to crassly insult both Palin and the Tea Party attendees by saying:

TeaBagger crowd: polite. The nutjobs who were bussed to Town Halls didn’t get their way paid to Sarah’s $100,000 speech

TeaBagger crowd? Is this what passes for informed commentary? Bashing a group of people with whom you disagree politically by labeling their movement with a degrading pornographic term? Just because the crew at MSNBC thinks it’s a hoot doesn’t mean it’s a great idea. I mean, have you seen MSNBC’s ratings lately?

Did Ebert stop to consider how many of those ”teabaggers” might be Ebert fans who follow him on Twitter? I wonder how many of them read his movie reviews for guidance on their entertainment choices. But like so many of the entertainment world elite, if you disagree with him, you’re a dumbkopf who deserves to be insulted, regardless of whether or not you are a consumer of his product.

Still though, while Ebert is definitely a self-admitted man of the left, he is in the language business. So you can certainly understand him putting down that segment of his potential audience which doesn’t comprehend the nuances and subtleties of the English Language to the same masterful degree that he does: