WIMBLEHACK: THE SAD END

[tishaLA]

Who's the Hacky-ist hack around? Shock! It's NOT Howard Fineman.

...Such is the situation with Wimblehack, which comes to an end this week in highly unsatisfactory fashion. The much-hyped prize to the winner is going to have to be put off, for now, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the Press had felt quite confident that the winner would ultimately prove to be Newsweek's Howard Fineman, and had staked much of its prize plans (which failed, hilariously, anyway) in that direction.

But Fineman never filed an election post-mortem for Newsweek, and aside from a few cautiously irritating exchanges with Joe Scarborough in which he disingenuously defended Maureen Dowd as his "favorite high-brow hussy," Fineman kept a very low profile after the election. There was no rationally defensible way to declare him the winner, except on the basis of his cumulative record. And that would have been a cop-out even worse than the already egregious cop-out this final round is going to represent.

That leaves as the winner Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, who did file a number of grossly objectionable pieces after the election, and so wins the contest, if not yet the prize. And though this contest fails in its stated objective of delivering a just reward, we can say with a clear conscience that Bumiller deserves her hollow victory, for consistently representing almost everything that made this campaign the Monumental Bummer it was <...>

How does one decide the country's Worst Campaign Journalist? Well, the one who loves his job the most is probably a good candidate. Why not the reporter whose first cheerful thought after the election was the hand-sewn suit of Don Evans? New York Press apologizes for not having a prize ready for Elisabeth Bumiller, but hopes readers will allow us time to try to make amends. We have four more years, after all.

http://nypress.com/17/46/news&columns/taibbi.cfm