Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, who recently announced that he'd switched his support from President Obama to Mitt Romney in a Daily Beast column, took on critics on Twitter today in a passionate face-off.
It all started when Bissinger tweeted that Obama was a "hawk in lib's clothing" but that the "best thing about Obama is that he did take Bin Laden down. Major kudos."
American Prospect writer Jamelle Bouie responded that reading Bissinger's feed "is like gazing into the mind of a low-information voter."
Bissinger flew into a rage:
And from a little earlier today:
Bissinger, who's written on sports, culture, and media (he wrote "Shattered Glass," the article about Stephen Glass that was turned into a movie) for years for Vanity Fair and other publications, didn't immediately return a request for comment.
He wrote in his Daily Beast column that after being a Democrat his whole life, he'd decided to support Romney.
"By instinct I still cling to my Democrat roots," he wrote. "But I admit that as I get older, on the cusp of 58, I am moving more to the center or even tweaking right, or at least not tied to any ideology."
Update: Bissinger called back on Wednesday evening, having just gotten back from Cannes.
"First of all it’s kind of surprising to me that this is attracting so much attention," he said. "I’m not Jean-Paul Sartre or John Updike, I’m Buzz Bissinger."
As for his tweets, "I do it to everybody and I’ve done it to Romney," he said. (See this roundup of his tweets, pre-Romney conversion.)
"The point of them is to be funny," he said. "Are my tweets inconsistent? Yes. Am I inconsistent? Yes."
Bissinger said he's lost friends over the conversion, but "I don't consider them friends anymore." He's also faced heavy criticism from colleagues, he said.
"I’m just getting tired of people saying 'you don’t know the facts, you don’t know the policy,'" he said. "That’s a bunch of bullshit."