NBC's Andrea Mitchell tries to dunk on Ted Cruz and embarrasses herself instead

Veteran NBC News journalist Andrea Mitchell attempted to dunk on Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and instead manifested her own literary ignorance.

Mitchell made the embarrassing gaffe on Wednesday in a tweet intending to mock Cruz for making a famous literary reference.

".@SenTedCruz says #ImpeachmentTrial is like Shakespeare full of sound and fury signifying nothing. No, that's Faulkner," tweeted Mitchell.

But, as so many noted on Twitter, Cruz was in fact correct and Mitchell didn't realize that William Faulkner had lifted the title of his book from one of Bard's plays.

"Faulkner got it from Shakespeare (who put it in the mouth of a murderer, incidentally)," corrected Ramesh Ponnuru of the American Enterprise Institute.

"Smug condescension levitating above an abyss of ignorance," responded Blake Masters.

Cruz took the opportunity to chide Mitchell with another Shakespeare quote, this one from Hamlet.

"Methinks she doth protest too much," tweeted Cruz, adding the reference to his tweet.

"Touché," responded Mitchell, who added an apology after her original tweet.

"I clearly studied too much American literature and not enough Macbeth. My apologies to Sen. Cruz," tweeted Mitchell.

The Shakespearian Twitter feud followed upon a statement from Cruz deriding the impeachment trial in the Senate against former President Donald Trump.

"I think we'll see the trial continue for the rest of the week. It is reminiscent of Shakespeare that it is full of sound and fury and yet signifying nothing. I think are you going to see a lot of partisan table pounding. You're going to see a lot of effort to pull on emotion. We saw the beginning of that with the Hollywood video that the House managers began with. I think we'll see a lot more of that today and tomorrow," Cruz said on Fox News Tuesday.

He went on to say that it's nearly impossible for Democrats to convict the president in the Senate since so many Republicans had already vocalized their opposition to the proceedings, which required a two-thirds majority bar to pass.

On Wednesday, senators saw new footage from the U.S. Capitol rioting, including one video showing how close Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was to a confrontation with the rioters.

Here's more about the Senate trial:

It's the second day of Donald Trump's second impeachment trial — Here's what happenedwww.youtube.com