In his latest opinion piece, Roger Ebert proved that he is very skilled at one thing and one thing only - movie reviews. 

Ebert penned a piece in his Journal for the Chicago Sun-Times today; a scathing critique which detests the overt melodrama, the wretched dialogue, and the lack of a plot line.  What was he reviewing?  The Republican base.

Ebert hammers the party's base with such sensationalistic rhetoric that it is difficult to believe he withheld laughter while typing away on the keyboard.  And the work is wrought with such falsehoods, inaccuracies, and sweeping generalizations, that it is difficult to fathom that this work could have passed by the desk of anyone having the word ‘Editor' following their name.  Yet somehow, it did.

The list of vitriol and insults follows...

The Associated Press today reports on the death of Gerard Damiano, described by AP writer Sarah Larimer as the director of a "pioneering pornographic film":

Damiano's "Deep Throat" was a mainstream box-office success and helped launch the modern hardcore adult-entertainment industry. Shot in six days for just $25,000, the 1972 flick became a cultural must-see for Americans who had just lived through the sexual liberation of the 1960s.

Mainstream box-office success?  A cultural must-see?  Not as I recall.  In a 2005 Los Angeles Times piece disputing claims of how much money was made by "Deep Throat," Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Hiltzik noted that the movie was "banned in half the country and generally exhibited in one theater at a time even in the biggest cities, such as New York and Los Angeles."

Roger Ebert the movie critic may not be a big fan of melodrama. Roger Ebert the liberal columnist is a different story.

Ebert went so far as to say voting against McCain-Palin would be a vote to "save the Republic":

I trust the American people will see through Palin, and save the Republic in November. The most damning indictment against her is that she considered herself a good choice to be a heartbeat away. That shows bad judgment.

Ebert did mercifully leave Palin's religion and her family out of the mix, but he scoffed at Palin as ill-educated and ill-traveled, all while mocking her for mocking elite liberal sensibilities:

Normally, the news that a film about racism won the Oscar for best picture is pretty much a dog-bites-man type of story. Old hat. Done before. What usually happens.

Not this year, though. The upset victory of "Crash" in the Academy Awards race has proven to be just that, but more for supporters of "Brokeback Mountain" than for anything else. Apparently, hell also hath no fury like a slightly-above-average gay movie scorned.

The backlash against "Crash" has been such that even avowedly liberal film critic Roger Ebert has stepped up to defend the film he had been pulling for to win the Oscar. After listing some of the more ridiculous criticisms from "Brokeback" supporters (see here, here, and here for more), Ebert notes how Academy of Motion Picture critics blithely ignore "Capote," which chronicled gay journalist Truman Capote's attempts to write the story of a murder of a rural family: