How drunk was Caleb Howe when he made fun of Rogert Ebert's cancer on Twitter? Probably really drunk. However, he does not reveal exactly how drunk in the bizarre pseudo-apology to Ebert which for some reason Mediaite ran tonight.

Last weekend, conservative blogger Caleb Howe—who blogs at Red State—tweeted some pretty terrible things about film critic Roger Ebert, who's jaw was removed because of cancer:

The thing that sparked Caleb Howe's ire was a tweet Ebert posted berating kids at a California high school for wearing American flag T-shirts to their school on Cinqo De Mayo. Also, probably a lot of vodka. But the way Caleb Howe tells it in his Mediaite essay, his cancer tweets were all an elaborate ploy to bait liberals into being as mean to him as he was to Ebert. Enraged, Ebert's defenders would start getting ugly, and

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.

An excellent plan, and a good way to spend your time if you've gotten bored with all the free porn on the Internet. But as Howe goes about enacting his revenge, he hits a snag: The universality of the human condition or some bullshit like that. As he pores over Ebert's tweet for each Tea Party smear and Sarah Palin put down, he is taken aback by how regularly intelligent and witty Ebert is.

And then I figured it out. That's exactly how I am. Half of my tweets are normal, off-topic, funny (if I do say so) or conversational. And half must set afire the blood of any left-wing tweeter. I'm just like Ebert, minus the fame, fortune, education, writing talent, and painful disease. It's like he was … human.

Let us return for a moment to our original question: How drunk was Howe when he pounded that stuff out on his keyboard and hit the enter button! Probably really drunk, judging by what he tweeted directly from launching on his rant: "Wife just revealed twe (sic) have fifth of vodka in freezer. That means I'm about to say things about Roger Ebert that Media Matters won't like." In fact Howe has a long history of sitting in front of his computer drinking vodka and tweeting about it:

So, we're going to say he was really drunk. Probably partial black-out? Maybe he had a vague memory of typing the next morning. Next question: How drunk was he when he wrote this essay? To be so deluded that this exercise in self-aggrandizement with a one-sentence apology at the end might make him seem like less of a creepy drunk pounding away on the Internet after a shot or twelve, spilling the worst parts of himself out into the world. (See also: His gleeful celebration of Congressman John Murtha's death.) Also up for debate, the drunkness level of the Mediaite person that put this on their website. (Awesome get! A guy who makes fun of cancer survivors!) The first political essay for and by drunk assholes. Caleb Howe is like the Tucker Max of politics. (Without the writing talent.)

Update: Caleb Howe complained we did not get his comment on this article, so I interviewed him via Twitter:

