To be clear up front: We're hardly shocked to see chronic trash-talker Jeff Moss tweet nastily about a Lions employee. He is, after all, the Andrew Dice Clay of Detroit sports blogging and podcasting (with the stability of Dave Chappelle, it seems).

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But a callout is deserved when he spews harshness at a 23-year-old multimedia producer in her first post-college job.

One of Tori Petry's assignments this summer involves touring the state with a team helmet and camera to create "Michigan helmet hunt" images in a partnership with Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan. Hokey? You betcha, though no more than stunts staged regularly by brands great and small. Transparent? Yes again, as there's no attempt to pretend this isn't sponsored content.    

None of that matters to the Detroit Sports Rag bully, who prides himself on putting the ass in crass. Here's how he starts a series of Labor Day swipes, replying to a tweet showing Petry with a helmet (text above his):

Nice, right?


Tori Petry, who tweeted this photo Sunday, joined the Lions' digital media staff in August 2014. (Twitter photo)

Petry -- who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida last year and joined the Lions a few months later -- was hired to do this type of promotion, as well as creating video interviews and appearing on preseason and pregame shows.

News flash: She doesn't "need to seek attention" -- she's doing her job.

Flash No. 2: It doesn't matter whether she's "proud" of the team or whether it's "pathetic" -- she's paid to do a job. And even if Moss doesn't think so, it's a respectable, legitimate job.

One mini-concession: Her digital media department title uses a word that's a target for sharpshooter Moss. The team's site lists Petry as a multimedia journalist.

While she uses journalistic interviewing and video storytelling techniques, no corporate publicist should be called a journalist. That's sloppiness at best, and perhaps intentional gamesmanship at worst.

Either way, it's not the newcomer's fault if her bosses want to pretend she, Mike O'Hara ("columnist") and six others in the department act as journalists. And surely her 6,200 Twitter followers aren't duped into thinking the helmet tweets and others are news reports.

C'mon now, Jeff. Pick on Tom Lewand, Martha Firestone Ford, Jim Caldwell or Matt Stafford -- but lay off the career-starting multimedia producer.

Even Clay, Chappelle and most other comics heed the adage to punch up, not down. (OK, Clay is probably a bad example. You don't have to be.)

But lobbing shots a a 23-year-old is considered fair sport in Moss-land on a steamy holiday afternoon. Here's part of an exchange this writer initiated with the blogger:

Leave it there, you might imagine? Nuh-uh, not this West Bloomfield madman.

Here's another Labor Day tweet by the Lions' rep, followed by Moss' apropos-nothing cheap shot:

And when another critic pipes up late Monday night:

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We get it. Unyielding, unapologetic, unrepentant, unremorseful -- those could be brand slogans for Detroit Sports Rag.

Anyone who punches down that way uses tactics similar to those of a classic American bully -- odious Sen. Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s anti-Communist witchhunts. And each of them deserves to hear the timeless question that finally hammered home a nation's revulsion:

You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?