Fierce GOP critic Chris Matthews of MSNBC got into a confrontation with some delegates to the convention early Friday morning and showed why he is a hypersensitive lout.

The Hill:

Matthews told The Hill in a phone interview that after he left the restaurant, he heard a group of guys "heckling" and "hooting and hollering" at him.
 
He headed back into the restaurant to mix it up with them. "I wanted to confront them," Matthews said, describing his exchange with the men as "towel-snapping" among guys.
 
Matthews said he told the rowdy group, "What's this, a douchebag convention?"

How classy. It gets better:

 In a statement emailed to The Hill on Friday afternoon, Matthews said, "I was talking to this 2 a.m. get-together of loud-talking people who had been heckling me from inside a restaurant and were now huddled together around a table. It was that get-together, right there in front of me; that was the 'convention' I was towel-snapping about. When The Hill called me and suggested I might have been referring to the Republican National Convention I couldn't believe it. That's wrong."
 
He added, "I was trying in my way to engage, as I often do, with critics, hoping to find some common ground. Sometimes it works out better than this." 
 
Sal Bacarella, who was in town to attend the convention, told The Hill that when Matthews entered the restaurant, New York City Councilman Eric Ulrich, a GOP delegate, waved to him. But Matthews snubbed Ulrich, according to Bacarella.
 
Ulrich then attempted to acknowledge Matthews as the "Hardball" host exited the restaurant, a gesture that Matthews answered with a "dirty look," prompting loud boos from other delegates at the restaurant, Bacarella said.
 
One convention-goer yelled out "hey, a--hole," to Matthews, at which point the combative host walked back toward the hostile bunch.

The delegates said that they asked Matthews whether he had gotten a thrilling sensation from Mitt Romney's speech on Thursday night, and Matthews responded that he had not.
 
Following a 2008 speech by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, Matthews said, "I felt this thrill going up my leg."

An ill-tempered lout, to be sure. I find it interesting that he can't be bothered to talk to the little folk who make up his viewership -- however few there are. One would think that someone whose show is watched by fewer people than a show on Tibetan sand sculptures would be a little nicer to his audience.