Someone at Mediaite (which is what TigerBeat would be if it was edited by Howard Kurtz) thought it would be a cool beans idea to offer some of their unused bandwidth to Erick Erickson’s drunken unemployable rentboy, Caleb Howe, so Caleb could kind-of sort-of apologize to Roger Ebert for acting like the drunken unemployable douchebag that Caleb Howe is.  In a stuttering  purge of wingnutty glossolalia, Caleb explains that his collection of  hi-larious “make fun of Roger Ebert’s cancer” twitter twats was just a performance piece to get get people to call Caleb an asshole, and guess what? No, really. Guess. It worked!:

When the hits started rolling in, I infuriatingly taunted the naysayers with non-sequiturs and your momma jokes. That’s when they started getting real. Saying awful things. Well you see, it’s ok with me. I had earned it.

And therein lay my plan. I’d wait a few days, gather the most insulting tweets, and publish. The fact that they felt free to “go there” with me proves they implicitly accept my premise. For they were using my logic, you see. Ebert had “earned” it, so I was free to open fire. Now I had earned it, so they were free to open fire. Media Matters was a no-brainer. I’d invited them in advance. But imagine my delight when bomb-throwing gossip site Gawker linked to my twitter feed. I fairly twisted my mustache and rubbed my palms greedily. Everything was proceeding as I had foreseen it; better, even.

Success! Wolverines!

But then, like an after-school special about a drunken blogger cheerleader who mocks another person’s cancer acne and then something happens to her that is totally ironic (in a non-Alanis Morrisette way) and the drunken blogger cheerleader suddenly realizes that deep down the cancer acne person is human being with feelings just like herself which then leads to a, “Hey, whoa! I’m being a dick” epiphany:

I can’t say that I like Roger Ebert very much. But I like people. I can’t say I care much for how he chooses to treat tea partiers, or the substance of his political views, or his position regarding Cinco de Mayo. But I can say he is a man. He lives his life, he loves others, he appreciates beauty. He is a man. A human. Just like Bob the tea partier, just like Arizona politicians, just like the Mexican students at that high school in California. I can’t say I like him, but I can say I shouldn’t hate him. And I shouldn’t have flippantly picked what I thought would hurt him the most, just because I thought I had a point to make on Twitter. Cheaply. Callously.

So now CNN should totally hire Caleb Howe because, like Erick Erickson, he’s grown up a whole lot since last week.

The end.