I don’t know who to blame for not letting the Buzz Bissinger-Will Leitch “debate” die. Bissinger hasn’t shut up, trying to explain over and over again that his point still stands, but he shouldn’t have been such a dick. I say, if you have to be such a dick in the first place, it kind of kills your point, but who am I?

Some of Bissinger’s friends have weighed in, repeating the blogs are bad because they aren’t professional while showing a lack of professionalism by not doing a good job researching the topic. For instance, Leonard Shapiro of the Washington Post defended Bissinger, including more complaining about blog commenters.

Bissinger and Shapiro and their buddies are so worried about how blog commenters – which are really just the guys from the bar with computer access – are bringing down society with rude and profane discussion. I just wonder why don’t they take a few minutes to praise sites like Fire Joe Morgan, which includes little commentary and all of it submitted via e-mail so the bloggers (which include Michael Shur, a writer and producer for “The Office” and the guy who plays Mose Schrute on the show).

I guess it’s easier to blast the commenters instead of showing that there are lots of different blogs. Sure, they now know enough to say you can’t speak about blogs generally, but then they do it anyway, ignoring the ones that disprove their negative point.

At the same time, the bloggers and commenters continue to respond, some of them in a really negative tone. But Christmas Ape, aka Michael Tunison who lost his job at the Post because of his blogging at Kissing Suzy Kolber, makes perhaps the best point of all at Deadspin, one which Bissinger and Shapiro will never get.

… haven’t many already made the claim that our culture’s obsession with sports alone is evidence enough of a “dumbing down”? My opinion is that sports is entertainment first, no matter how much significance you wish to attach to it.

The fact that we’re talking about how people write about sports has never really entered the conversation here. It’s sports, for God’s sake. Games and how we perceive them. If we can’t have some fun talking about athletics, what’s the point? Sports bloggers aren’t dumbing down society. They just realize that taking the act of men chasing a ball around a field too seriously is just laughable.