The smackdown as a blog carnival

A while back, Paul at Wizbang started posting a bunch of broadsides at "evolutionist oozers" and in general making an utter fool of himself, provoking righteous smackdowns not just from liberal and science bloggers, but from a few of his fellow conservatives. He and his Wizbang buddies later claimed that it was just an April Fool's joke. Maybe it was indeed planned. Even if it was, Paul ended up looking like a scientifically ignorant (and proud of it!) anti-intellectual twit, all the while disingenuously claiming he wasn't a creationist. Well, now the very conservative blogger The Commissar at The Politburo Diktat has resurrected the issue and taken blog thrashing to a whole new level, in essence declaring war on Paul with an opening broadside he calls his Carnival of the Coward, where he has gathered a large number of criticisms of Paul's behavior from a wide variety of bloggers.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I do feel a guilty sense of schadenfreude seeing someone of Paul's arrogance get yet another round of what he himself sowed (and given my that my average daily hit count is actually slightly less than Dan Riehl's I can certainly like seeing his broadside against Paul's arrogant dismissal of him because of "pathetic stats" on his blog ). In a similar vein, as a conservative-leaning type, it irritates me to see people like Paul make the rest of us look bad. On the other hand, I'm beginning to think that The Commissar has let this grudge match get out of hand. It's become a bit unseemly, albeit still somewhat entertaining. (Of course, one could claim that I'm only saying that because the most unseemly thing of all is that The Commissar neglected to mention my take and followup on Paul--but that would be wrong. . .)

Personally, I think it's time to let it go, unless Paul resurrects it. I don't think I want to see a Carnival of the Coward #2.