Naked self-promotion

No, really, you don't want to see me naked. Trust me on this.

However, I will stoop to alerting readers that, once again, Orcinus has been honored with multiple nominations in the annual Koufax Awards at Wampum. I normally pay absolutely no attention to most Web awards and their nominees (I was nominated in thiz year's meaningless Weblog awards, too), but the Koufax awards mean something, in no small part because of the quality of the competition, as well as the spirit in which they are overseen by the folks at Wampum.

This year I've been nominated in the following categories: Best Blog by a Non-Professional, Best Single Issue Blog, Best Expert, Best Writing, Best Series, and Best Post.

The Best Series nomination is for "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism," the entire links to which can be found in the upper left margin of the site. (I'm working on a PDF, I promise.)

There are three "Best Post" nominations: for "A liberal war on terror," "Media Revolt: A Manifesto," and "The Political and the Personal," the latter of which is a mistake, since I wrote it in 2003. (In fact, it was a finalist in last year's Best Post competition, and was nudged out, I think, by a stroke of Billmon's brilliant pen.) So please don't vote for it.

I always have mixed feelings about these things. As regular readers know, this isn't really a single-issue blog; on the other hand, I write regularly enough about right-wing extremism (and related areas of hate crimes and domestic terrorism) to make this a close enough approximation. I'm not really an expert (I just play one on TV, is my line); I'm in fact simply a journalist who does a lot of research and groundwork, though this does lend itself to a certain kind of expertise in the fields I specialize in. And I have few illusions about seriously competing for either Best Non-Professional Blog (we all know who's gonna win that) or the one category I'd be most honored to win (namely, Best Writing).

I have decidedly mixed feelings in the Best Series category (which I was honored to win last year). I think "Pseudo Fascism" is overall a stronger, more cohesive essay, than most of what I've written here, and I think it may prove important some day. Still, one of my chief competitors this year is Eric Muller for his (and Greg Robinson's magnificent series of posts debunking Michelle Malkin, to which I linked copiously as well. If I were voting, I'd vote for myself, but you could certainly make the case that Muller is more deserving, since he at least had a discernible real-world impact with his work.

This gets back to my general uneasiness with awards, because they pit apples against oranges sometimes -- or rather, rubies against emeralds.

Still, the Wampum folks run the awards in a real spirit of openness and fairness, the competition is always good-spirited, and I think the left side of the blogosphere is genuinely represented there, so in the end they make a real contribution to the commonweal. Please be sure to click the little "Make a Donation" button at the top of the Wampum home page and chip in for a good cause.