As we’ve been telling you, TPM is ending up 2007 with a big, exciting, super-well Muck-O-Rama Extravaganza contest, honoring the great acts of venal corruption, outstanding self-inflicted losses of dignity, crimes against the republic, bribery, exposed hypocrisy and general muckiness.
And we’ve named the award the Golden Duke in honor of the now-incarcerated Randy “Duke” Cunningham. It’s been a heady few years for Muckraking, what with the meta-Abramoff scandal and so much more. But here at TPM we still believe that Duke is the iconic modern scandal. Duke ushered the recent storm of muck. And few so well combine outlandish venal corruption, national security, sex, and sheer cartoonish ridiculousness.
On Friday we introduced a esteemed panel of outside judges who will judge the nominees and today we announce the categories in which we’ll award prizes.
They are …
Best Testimonial Trainwreck
Outstanding Achievement in Improbable Forgetfulness
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
Best Scandal — Local Venue
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
Best Scandal — General Interest
The deadline for nominations is December 14th. And we’ll be handing out exciting prizes both for the winners and also to the readers whose nominations we choose as finalists.
So here’s how it works. If you want to nominate some evil-doer for one of our awards, send us a nomination identifying the person you’re nominating and a description/argument of no more than 250 words explaining their achievements, bad acts or generally scandalous behavior that you believe entitles them to the award. All awards are to individual mucksters and evil-doers. So for example, you may believe Alberto Gonzales should win for the US Attorney scandal. But the nomination has to be for Gonzales, not the scandal itself.
On December 18th we’ll announce the nominees, which then then go to our panel of distinguished judges. And the awards will be announced on the last day of the year, December 31st, new year’s even, since, as we can see with Shag Fund, you really don’t know what the best scandals will be until the year is really definitively over.
At least one of the awards, for best Testimonial Trainwreck, requires video. So you can pick from our TPMtv videos as illustrations of the behavior you believe win. But you can also include video for the other nominations if it seems appropriate.
Winning TPM Reader Nominators will win special limited edition TPM 2007 Golden Duke Awards mugs as well as more prizes to be announced shortly.
