Not that I'm usually one to jump in and start promoting a food fight, but Joe Klein took quite a whack at Eric Alterman in a post on Swampland yesterday afternoon:

Also, a personal aside to Eric Alterman, who has been on my case--in the most futile and pathetic way--for nearly 20 years: This weekly stuff you're doing about Time's columnists... does that mean the Rick Stengel suckup campaign is over?

Ouch.

Another mini food fight worth mentioning is the one going on between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rush Limbaugh. Robert Salladay brings us up to speed in today's Los Angeles Times. Drudge is teasing that Arnold will appear on Limbaugh's radio program today - and if you go to Limbaugh's site you'll see it says that Arnold "has asked to appear" on the show and will come on at 1:06pm ET." That should be fun.

Lastly, a brief update on the ongoing food fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. After Clinton pollster Mark Penn surprised Obama strategist David Axelrod earlier in the week with an attack on the consistency of Obama's antiwar position, Clinton pivoted yesterday with a plea for unity:

Hillary Rodham Clinton is asking for a Pax Obama when it comes to attacks on her October 2002 vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq.[snip]

"What unites Democrats is much greater than what divides us, and we need to stay focused on trying to rein in the president and reverse this escalation," Clinton told reporters in the Capitol Tuesday when asked about Obama.

"We're trying to get the president to change direction by having a unified Democratic position. ... That's what's important now."

How very shrew - sorry, I mean shrewd - of Clinton to have a surrogate preemptively strike by distorting Obama's position on the war and then for her to turn around and magnanimously offer a truce.

I'm afraid Hillary's wish for a detente with Obama over the war in Iraq has about as much chance of coming true as my seven year old son's wish that I'll let him drive the car. As Jason Horowitz reports in this week's NY Observer about a recent trip to Obama HQ in Chicago:

Indeed, [Obama's] staff consciously seeks to embrace them, uniformly assuming the posture of Chicago underdogs, eager to prove that they can take on Hillary Clinton and all the heavyweights of her adopted city.

"As Barack says, Chicago politics is a contact sport, and he understands how to play that," said Robert Gibbs, the campaign's communications director, who recently mixed it up with his Clinton counterpart, Howard Wolfson, in a very public spat. "It's incumbent on us to demonstrate an ability to tangle."

I guess the "changing the smallness of our politics" thing will have to wait until after Obama becomes President.