BY TOM TOMORROW
There’s a rumor that Jeopardy champion and occasional guest blogger Bob Harris might make a surprise appearance at my signings in either New York or Los Angeles–or possibly both, oddly enough. Can’t be confirmed, though.
Incidentally, I’ve been reading the manuscript to Bob’s new book. I don’t think I’m supposed to say much about it, but I will say this: I think Bob is about to really hit the big time.
The book should hit stores on Thursday, and the week after that I’ll be on tour, so blogging will probably be light. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who pre-ordered so far. I’ve mentioned this several times before, but I don’t assume that everyone who visits this site memorizes every word I write, so forgive me for repeating myself: this one is important to me. This is sink-or-swim time.
After more than a decade with St. Martin’s, it was painfully clear that while they would publish the books, they were simply not ever going to put much effort into promoting them. I’m not the only person who’s ever had this experience with SMP; I saw one relatively well-known author refer to them bitterly once as “St. Tombstones”. My own editor there was perfectly willing to sign me on again, but even he agreed it would be a lot better for my career if I could find a new home somewhere else.
So I asked my agents to shop around a proposal to other houses. I guess they gave it some amount of effort, but they came back empty handed, which left me feeling pretty discouraged. However, at around the same time, I had agreed to let John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton use a panel out of context from a cartoon on the cover of their book, Weapons of Mass Distraction, as long as they published the full cartoon inside — but when I got my copy of the book, the full cartoon wasn’t there. I called up their editor with every intention of reading him the riot act, but somehow by the end of the conversation, I had a new publisher instead.
So now I’ve got people actually making a push, though I’m still a little on edge — the publicist I was working with for the past several months left the job rather abruptly, and I’m afraid something important may fall through the cracks. (When an author loses an editor, this is called being “orphaned” — I assume the same term applies here.) At any rate, the material in this book is strong. It’s good work, and I’m proud of it, and I want this book to do well — which means putting myself out there a lot more than I usually like to do. (Believe it or not, I’m generally pretty interview-shy, at least when I don’t have anything specific I’m trying to promote). As some of you will remember, the Colbert Report was initially interested in having me on, but unfortunately that fell through, for reasons unknown. (Speaking of which, I’m officially abandoning my little “fake feud” riff — I got too much email from people who thought I seriously had Colbert confused with O’Reilly.) (I shudder to imagine the email Colbert himself must receive.) The Daily Show, meanwhile, hasn’t given us a final “no” yet — you can send them a note of encouragement here, if you’re so inclined (use the drop-down menu). Who knows, maybe it’ll help. And if by any small chance I have any readers out there in a position to help me get the word out about this book to audiences that might not otherwise hear about it — i.e. reporters at daily newspapers or mainstream magazines, producers at radio or tv programs, organizers of book festivals, whatever — please, shoot me an email.
Might have a few minutes of downtime this morning. Bear with us.
Yglesias dug up this Crazy Andy gem from April 22, 2003 (not long after Pulling Down the Statue Day):
I was walking through my neighborhood the other day – in D.C.’s hyper-p.c. Adams Morgan – and I swear I’ve been seeing a few more anti-war posters since the war ended. The signs are perhaps expressions of some kind of rage at reality, especially a reality that has surely undermined some of the anti-Bush left’s cherished nostrums – that American military intervention is always evil, that nothing good can come from any Bush policy, that Iraqis will loathe being liberated, and so on.
Since the war ended. Yes, we all remember the end of the war, three fucking years and tens of thousands of deaths ago.
Here’s another good one, from April 02, 2003:
VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: (for egregiously bad predictions in wartime) “The administration premised virtually all of its strategy and most of its tactics on the assumption that the civilian population would treat us as liberators. Unfortunately, that basic assumption has been shown itself to be fundamentally flawed.” – Josh Marshall, April 1.
Yeah, Josh was sure off his rocker, wasn’t he? What a left-wing loonie.
And while we’re on the topic, we’d be derelict in our duty to forget this Instapundit classic from April 11, 2003:
Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen’s cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn’t rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a “quagmire” were wrong — again! — how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong — again! — how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error — again — and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about “civilian casualties” now seem almost disappointed that there weren’t more — again — and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American “liberators” were proven wrong — again — as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn’t stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It’s probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.
Nah.
posted at 04:36 PM by Glenn Reynolds
As the third anniversary of the war approaches, I’m in agreement with FAIR — it’s time to go back and take a second look at what its cheerleaders believed at the time. Feel free to send in your own favorite blasts from the warblogging past.
… looks like my own thoughts at the time were just a wee bit more nuanced…