Orlando Jones criticized for tweet urging liberals to kill Sarah Palin

Actor Orlando Jones, probably best known as a former pitchman for 7-Up and original cast member of MADtv, has found himself under attack from angry tweeters after he himself tweeted last Saturday, "Libyan Rebels kill Gaddafi, if American liberals want respect they better stop listening to Aretha & kill Sarah Palin(:"

The smiley face at the end was apparently not enough to mitigate the ire elicited by Jones' call for mama-grizzly hunting. But rather than apologize, Jones met his critics head on, responding to about three dozen different tweets over the next two days, answering one conservative woman with the user name @Obamamamadingdo by writing, "Advocating? No. Demanding? Delusional. Poking fun @ liberals and getting a response obama mandingo...priceless(:" And to another critic, @tn4p, he wrote, "I regret to inform you that jokes do not qualify as violent rhetoric. your angry reaction and response however, does(: keep smiling."

And today Jones tweeted:

"Obama gets more death threats than any Pres in US history...sorry too real. Hey, Orlando Jones tweeted something inane about Palin! Get him!...My tweet was farcical not funny or a call to action. 100 bucks 2 the 1st person who can count the # of Palin jokes about killing Democrats."

And thus we see Jones getting the kind of attention he hasn't received since the 7-Up commercial days. As we've seen, the nature of Twitter allows for the facile dashing off of quick, unthinking brain droppings, which can prove hazardous to careers like that of Gilbert Gottfried, whose joking tweet about the Japanese tsunami cost him a lucrative gig as the voice of the Aflac duck. In this case, though Jones' joke is in poor taste, it's not quite the same as making light of an entire nation's misfortune following a tragic natural disaster. It's remarkable how Sarah Palin always manages to be in the news, even when she's not running for office.