With two and a half days left to vote in the 2008 Weblog Awards, the question to ask is whether, despite eight nominations, the PUMA-sphere can nonetheless fail to secure a single Weblog Award. As it turns out, yes – yes they can. When voting closes on Monday, PUMAs will end the year oh for three: they lost the primaries, lost the election (after embracing Sarah Palin as a “true feminist”), and now they’ll lose out on any formal recognition for their insatiable efforts to promote mindless reactionary politics. Good riddance, PUMAs, and welcome to the dustbin of history. It’s been waiting for you for some time now.
The two PUMA blogs with the best chance to win – “UppityWoman08″ and our archnemesis “The Confluence” – now trail to “~Synthesis~” and “Wonkette,” respectively, and we here salute our benevolent overlords at “Wonkette” for engineering this coup. While Wonkette has taken its fair share of flak from Jon Swift & Grace the Spot, they’re missing the point: if the results for the winning blogs are artificially inflated by Wonkette-powered poll crashing, PUMA nominations are themselves the result of artificially inflated political chicanery. PUMA-ism owes its existence to the mass delusion that Barack Obama somehow “stole” the primaries from Hillary Clinton by doing nothing more than keeping his promise to Hillary regarding Florida & Michigan when Hillary herself broke it, and it owes its continuance to the blind, unfocused rage that led deluded Hillary voters to embrace Sarah Palin over Hillary’s express request to the contrary. PUMAs are themselves the angry mob that they decry in Wonketeers, just on a much bigger (and vastly more important) scale.
If PUMAs don’t like the Wonkette “angry mob” approach to voting, it may be because Wonkette has done to web-voting what PUMAs tried (and failed) to national politics. I’m sure the reflection is none too flattering.
