SARAH PALIN IS getting it from all sides today. Not only has she been a target of angry WikiLeaks supporters but now she’s had her reality TV show branded a “snuff film” by the creator of West Wing.

Aaron Sorkin, who also wrote the script for The Social Network, about the founding of Facebook, took issue with the latest episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska in which she shoots a caribou (a species of deer). Writing on the Huffington Post, Sorkin called Palin “a phony pioneer girl” who showed herself hunting with her father and shooting the animal “for political gain”.

He quoted a “snotty quote” posted by 2012 Presidential candidate hopeful Palin on her Facebook page in advance of the hunting segment of the show being aired. She wrote:

Unless you’ve never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation.

Sorkin responded:

I eat meat, chicken and fish, have shoes and furniture made of leather, and PETA is not ever going to put me on the cover of their brochure and for these reasons Palin thinks it’s hypocritical of me to find what she did heart-stoppingly disgusting. I don’t think it is, and here’s why.

He continued by saying that he didn’t “relish the idea of torturing animals”. He made a distinction between himself and Palin, saying:

I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing the animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals.

Sorkin also called Palin “deranged” and “a witless bully”.

Palin quickly fired off her volley of response, writing an email to Associated Press:

So a left-wing Hollywood producer thinks there is no ‘distinction’ between harvesting healthy, wild organic protein to feed my family and engaging in dog fighting? I didn’t know anyone ate dogs, tanned the hides and made boots out of them.

Sorkin has locked horns with Palin before. In an interview on a new CNN chat programme called Park/Spitzer in October, Sorkin referred to Palin as an “idiot” and a “remarkably, stunningly, jaw-droppingly incompetent and mean woman”.

This is Sorkin in full flow: