Wow, quite a little slapfight in the crankosphere between the psychotic Jeff Godlstein and patterico over the last few days, I see. Wolcott is on it!

Yes, while the rest of us were blithely going on with our Christmassy lives and preparing our aluminum poles for Festivus, an ugly blogwar broke out in the right hemisphere of Godzilla-versus-Mothra scope and fury, featuring volley after return volley of fiery halitosis and hair-splitting pedantry. Escalating a minor dispute into an all-engulfing shit fit, Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein and Patterico’s Pontifications’ Patrick Frey locked themselves in a mutual-destruction danse macabre that couldn’t be more gaudy and futile if I had scripted it myself, in my recurring role as Mischievous Trickster. The catalyst for this duel at Diablo was an inquiry into whether certain moldy comments written in the nineties by conservative journalist and carnival barker Robert Stacy McCain revealed telltale residue of racism. This evolved into a Goldstein tutorial on authorial intent full of jargon and bluster which was met by Patrick Frey in a tedious display of his own brand of bravado, with ratfucky posters rushing to and fro from the comments sections of the two blogs with pipsqueak Iago poisonings of innuendo and incitement to keep everything at full spite.

Of course at root this really isn’t about accusations of racism or authorial intent or who promised to delete which emails or who banned whom from commenting, this is simply a foam-rubber swordfight between two sore, angry egos too fatuously proud to stand down.

I doubt inside blogball is entertaining to anyone but me, but I thought ‘carnival barker.’ was a perfect way to describe RSM.