We is a serious news organization what demands you retract tweets now.

The following sentence actually appears in a post on the site of a darling of conservative media:

We have identified yet another tweet we would like [Roger Ebert] to retract[.]

The “yet another” is delicious, as it indicates that Andrew Breitbart has initiated a campaign to compel people to retract their tweets. The vicious slur of a tweet in question reads:

Breitbart’s bright bulbs know that’s a lie:

We have established that we differ on the last sentence, but his claim he did not know that “teabaggers” is a pornographic term until the MSM (mainstream media) told him is provably false. We know it’s false because in 1998, Prof. Ebert reviewed a film containing this scene[.]

How can you not respect a corporate non-entity who insists on granting Ebert a doctorate for the sole purpose using “Prof.” as a diminutive? More to the point: how can you not pity the poor Breitbart intern who, I hope, is pretending to misunderstand Ebert’s patently sarcastic remark in order to score points with his boss? Because that’s what this all adds up to: some minion being forced to impersonate a tweet-retracting mountain camel in order to impress Andrew Breitbart. Because this is what impresses Andrew Breitbart: the retraction of tweets in which people call tea-baggers by the doubly ignorant name they chose for themselves.*

The demand to stop calling tea-baggers the name they gave themselves is, remarkably, not the dumbest part of this tweet-retraction crusade: that would be the faux-outrage Pam Meister musters upon learning that Ebert’s tweets don’t rise to the level of “informed commentary.” She suggests, with a straight face, that the lack of sustained commentary by Ebert is a grave failure of character, not a feature inherent in the Twitter’s 140 character limit; and she does this, of course, without acknowledging the vast archive of his writing freely available online. Granted, Meister might not be any better acquainted with Google than her fellow tea-baggers, but the point remains: she thinks Ebert should write tweets with more characters than Twitter allows, and until he does, she will be very, very cross with him.

Which is terrible, terrible news, as the odds of someone as soft as Ebert weathering this tweet-retraction campaign are slim indeed.

*They can pull down their site in an effort to deny it, but Google remembers that they were the ones who started using “tea-bag” as a verb, so they need to live with the consequences of their laziness and sexual stolidity. Liberals didn’t claim the Founding Fathers threw tea-bags into Boston Harbor, nor were they the ones who insisted on compounding the error of that anachronism by naming their movement without performing a precautionary Googling. For a movement so concerned with personal responsibility, you’d think someone in it might take some.