The Weblog Awards: The Bad
The 2005 Weblog Awards have been put to bed -- and it couldn't possibly have happened soon enough.
Granted, I brought on a lot of the abuse lobbed my way by the right-wing with my comments on these awards a week and a half ago but, good heavens, the way these conservatives reacted, you would have thought I suggested feeding hungry children or caring for the elderly or something.
I said in my post of December 7, that "unless a compelling reason to do otherwise comes up, I've said all I have to say about this pointless contest." That hasn't been an easy promise to keep, as I've taken my share of crap in the last 10 days from scores of conservative web sites.
I have two main things to say about the general reaction I've gotten from the right-wing blogosphere: First, I'll say that one should not spew vitriol – as I routinely do and as I did specifically at the start of these awards – and then cry when that fire gets returned. I expected it when I said that I thought these particular awards were just silly and that my readers had better things to do than even waste time going and voting for me. I'm a big boy and I can take the hostility prompted by those sentiments.
And, it may surprise my critics to hear that, in the vast majority of cases, I didn't think that what I got in return was incredibly out of line or unfair.
One of my competitors at Wuzzadem.com called me a "jackass" and "this Dog-breath guy." He also urged his readers to vote for anyone but me. My new friends at basil's blog ran alternating pictures of the Yellow Dog Blog logo, with pictures of Cheech and Chong and captions referring to my blog as "dog shit" and the like.
The Jawa Report said that readers should "...vote for anyone but that bleatasticfucktard" – uh, that would be me – and Paul, at awards-sponsoring Wizbang, obliquely referred to me as the "idiot finalist" in a piece saying that people like me should be pulled out of the contest if we're going to have bad attitudes.
To all of those people I have two words: fair enough. None of this was pleasant and what I necessarily like to read with my morning coffee, but I also don't believe it was terribly disproportionate to the things I routinely say about Republicans. If you give, you're gonna get, right?
I also seemed to have stepped into the middle of a conservative family squabble and become a pawn in that game.
Steve, at Hog on Ice, hounded readers almost daily to vote for me in posts like What Have you Done for Bob Lately? and Bob Needs You. I was truly touched until I saw that Steve's true intent was to poke a sharp stick in the eye of Wizbang. He heaps more ridicule on the Weblog Awards than I ever even thought, calling it a "two-bit blog award contest with no prize, freeped voting, and about as much prestige as a regular table at white castle" and also said that "...winning a Weblog Award is like being elected prom queen at fat camp."
He did this while making it clear to his readers that "Geiger's blog is crap." Gee, just when I was starting to like Steve...
Finally, there's Moxie – no, not the cool, liberal one – who had a post called "Vote for Pedro," in which she did a pretty neat Napoleon Dynamite Photoshop job on me. "Bob Geiger is a liberal you say? So why do we want him to win? Because the folks running that farce of an awards thing-a-ma-jig HATE him. HATE him. And that's good enough for me," writes Moxie.
Again, fair enough and fair enough. I was also the target of countless message-board and comments posts, with a substantial amount of unflattering things said about me. But that's all OK.
This was "the bad" and certainly took away any semblance of a good-natured, non-partisan competition – especially the cases where I was accused of cheating to get the most votes – but, as I was to find out, it paled in comparison to the swift-boating that was to come from another front.
More on that to follow in "the ugly."
Granted, I brought on a lot of the abuse lobbed my way by the right-wing with my comments on these awards a week and a half ago but, good heavens, the way these conservatives reacted, you would have thought I suggested feeding hungry children or caring for the elderly or something.
I said in my post of December 7, that "unless a compelling reason to do otherwise comes up, I've said all I have to say about this pointless contest." That hasn't been an easy promise to keep, as I've taken my share of crap in the last 10 days from scores of conservative web sites.
I have two main things to say about the general reaction I've gotten from the right-wing blogosphere: First, I'll say that one should not spew vitriol – as I routinely do and as I did specifically at the start of these awards – and then cry when that fire gets returned. I expected it when I said that I thought these particular awards were just silly and that my readers had better things to do than even waste time going and voting for me. I'm a big boy and I can take the hostility prompted by those sentiments.
And, it may surprise my critics to hear that, in the vast majority of cases, I didn't think that what I got in return was incredibly out of line or unfair.
One of my competitors at Wuzzadem.com called me a "jackass" and "this Dog-breath guy." He also urged his readers to vote for anyone but me. My new friends at basil's blog ran alternating pictures of the Yellow Dog Blog logo, with pictures of Cheech and Chong and captions referring to my blog as "dog shit" and the like.
The Jawa Report said that readers should "...vote for anyone but that bleatasticfucktard" – uh, that would be me – and Paul, at awards-sponsoring Wizbang, obliquely referred to me as the "idiot finalist" in a piece saying that people like me should be pulled out of the contest if we're going to have bad attitudes.
To all of those people I have two words: fair enough. None of this was pleasant and what I necessarily like to read with my morning coffee, but I also don't believe it was terribly disproportionate to the things I routinely say about Republicans. If you give, you're gonna get, right?
I also seemed to have stepped into the middle of a conservative family squabble and become a pawn in that game.
Steve, at Hog on Ice, hounded readers almost daily to vote for me in posts like What Have you Done for Bob Lately? and Bob Needs You. I was truly touched until I saw that Steve's true intent was to poke a sharp stick in the eye of Wizbang. He heaps more ridicule on the Weblog Awards than I ever even thought, calling it a "two-bit blog award contest with no prize, freeped voting, and about as much prestige as a regular table at white castle" and also said that "...winning a Weblog Award is like being elected prom queen at fat camp."
He did this while making it clear to his readers that "Geiger's blog is crap." Gee, just when I was starting to like Steve...
Finally, there's Moxie – no, not the cool, liberal one – who had a post called "Vote for Pedro," in which she did a pretty neat Napoleon Dynamite Photoshop job on me. "Bob Geiger is a liberal you say? So why do we want him to win? Because the folks running that farce of an awards thing-a-ma-jig HATE him. HATE him. And that's good enough for me," writes Moxie.
Again, fair enough and fair enough. I was also the target of countless message-board and comments posts, with a substantial amount of unflattering things said about me. But that's all OK.
This was "the bad" and certainly took away any semblance of a good-natured, non-partisan competition – especially the cases where I was accused of cheating to get the most votes – but, as I was to find out, it paled in comparison to the swift-boating that was to come from another front.
More on that to follow in "the ugly."
posted by Bob Geiger at 12/19/2005 10:25:00 AM
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