Well, thank goodness that didn't take long. One of the early criticisms of this effort is that there are all these nice opinions offered by many opinionated folks but it seems a little, oh, what's the word, boring? Indeed, as Farhad Manjoo points out in Salon: "[I]t would be great for Huffington's site if the sparks began to fly among her bloggers, if her dinner party turned into a brawl and if that brawl stretched across the Web, from her site to the millions of blogs online now. Because if you compare her site with Drudge's, what the Huffington Post seems to lack now is bite, and fight."
Well, no sooner said than done: Byron York and Jim Lampley are trading some sarcasm and mild insults over either whether George W. Bush fixed the Kentucky Derby or Giacomo stole the 2004 presidential election (Ohio and Kentucky are right next to each other, right?).
Now, whether York and Lampley qualify as A- or B- list bloggers (pace Jay Rosen in the aforementioned Salon piece), I don't know. But, one thing is true, a great thing about blogs is that there is always some squabble going on. It's partly because a significant (or at least significantly loud) section of the blogosphere is taken up by politics. Thus, there's always some enraged right-winger or agrieved lefty that feels the need to fly away with some cyber-slam. The fact that most people wouldn't say many of these things to the face of their ideological or cultural opponent just makes the whole thing more engaging.
Indeed, one is reminded of Chuck D.'s off-repeated line from the early '90s that "Rap was black folk's CNN." Overstated, of course, but Chuck meant that rap was a way of communicating what was "real" from one black neighborhood to another across the country. Briefly, I thought the corollary was that Fox News was white people's rap. O'Reilly's various wars against P. Diddy and Ludacris held some promise, but ultimately there wasn't there there. Besides, one of the great things about rap is that the beefs can come from multiple directions. It's The Game vs. 50 Cent vs. Ja Rule vs...
Which, of course, is why Blogworld may be become the true Caucasian rap equivalent (with apologies to Steve Gillard, LaShawn Barber, Booker Rising, Dawn Summers and other excellent bloggers of colors). The Daily Kossacks vs. the Red State Posse is one possible throwdown. Of course, NRO's The Corner and Andrew Sullivan are often sniping at one another.
In any event, the Lampley/York tiff is to be welcomed. If anything, they should take it to the next level. Going too far Old School -- in the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr sense -- would be a bit much. But there are other possibilities: If Lampley and York were to come to actual blows, would the former's expertise calling fights for HBO give him an edge? Or would York's deceptively slight frame -- and the fact that his first name is 'Byron' -- lull Lampley into letting his defenses down and thus be vulnerable to the sly right hook?
Now, if only Lampley could go after York without bringing up the "typical neocon disingenuity" stuff. Come on, Jim, can't you address the substance of Byron's argument without using the, uh, typical liberal neocon-is-the-bogeyman rhetoric? Something else that good rappers know when going after the target of their beef -- the flow must be fresh.