Justice for Ezra!

The boy was robbed!

Kriston Capps, a young arts writer in Washington, is a handsome fellow, that much is undeniable. And of Capps' housemate and friend Catherine Andrews, an editor at the Washingtonian magazine's Web site, it would not be too much to note, as many bloggers recently did, that she is just plain hot. The question before us, however, is not whether Capps and Andrews make you tingle; they do, and for that we ought be thankful. But are these two truly the hottest in Washington journalism?...

the contest was not on the up-and-up. Fishbowl's poll often functions less as an assessment of a nominee's hotness -- whatever that might mean -- than of online organizing prowess, and this year, it was even less than that. Capps and Andrews acknowledge that they won only because their online friends -- without their express encouragement, they both say -- built software "bots" that voted thousands of times for each of them. The bots were distributed on Unfogged, a humorously wonky blog and discussion site popular with D.C. types, within a day of the poll's opening.

This is, by any measure, a profound indictment of D.C. culture--one that only serves to confirm the suspicion of the unwashed masses, leery of Washington's cliquishness. They're right. Quite often, information that should be made public in newspapers and magazines does become off-the-record, but standard knowledge in rarefied (and even not-so-rarefied) Washington social circles. For instance, I and nearly everybody I know in town was perfectly aware of the bot controversy and said nothing. Nothing!

Thank you to Farhad Manjoo--no doubt one of Salon's courageous outsiders--for having the stones to make public what I and nearly all of liberal Washington were too selfish to report ourselves.