How Robert Ebert Sorta SORRY for His Tweet of Ryan Dunn's death

Roger Ebert's sorta sorry for his tweet about Ryan Dunn's death.

We're not quite sure what to call this. A back-handed apology?
In the backlash to his tweet about the death of "Jackass" star Ryan Dunn on Monday, Roger Ebert posted this to his Chicago-Sun Times blog today:
"To begin with, I offer my sympathy to Ryan Dunn's family and friends, and to those of Zachary Hartwell, who also died in the crash. I mean that sincerely. It is tragic to lose a loved one. I also regret that my tweet about the event was considered cruel. It was not intended as cruel. It was intended as true."
He granted what a lot of people criticized him for, that he "was probably too quick to tweet." But that's as far as the apology went.
"I meant exactly what I wrote," he wrote. "I was implying that someone who drinks and drives is a jackass. Just as I was when I was drinking."
So, apparently there was some personal stuff going on there when Ebert tweeted, just hours after Dunn's death, that "friends don't let jackasses drink and drive."
Witnesses have offered various accounts of how much Dunn and his pals were drinking at a bar before the accident. But authorities have not said that alcohol was a factor in the fiery crash. Speed, though, was. Police officials estimate that Dunn's Porsche was going 130 miles an hour when it collided with a guardrail and crashed in the woods in suburban Philadelphia.
Michael Carroll, chief of the West Goshen Township (Pa.) Police Department, told reporters that it was the "worst" accident he'd ever seen and that he'd "never seen a car destroyed in an automobile accident the way this car was ... even before it caught on fire."
In an odd twist, Ebert's Facebook page was temporarily taken down for about an hour on Tuesday, and people quickly assumed he was somehow being punished. In a war of tweets, Dunn's pal and "Jackass" co-star Bam Margera called Ebert a "piece of s--t" for saying what he did about Dunn.
“Facebook has removed my page in response, apparently, to malicious complaints from one or two jerks,” tweeted Ebert, “Facebook! My page is harmless and an asset to you. Why did you remove it in response to anonymous jerks? Makes you look bad.”
The Facebook folks called their action an oops. But we have to agree with Ebert on that one: Bad move, Facebook.
| Lisa Gutierrez