Various items

Review of "A Tragic Legacy"; upcoming and recorded interviews; Iran discussion at TPM Book Club.

Published July 1, 2007 5:43PM (EDT)

(1) Over at Daily Kos, SusanG has a lengthy, thoughtful and highly insightful review of my new book, A Tragic Legacy. Despite its continuing strong sales and widespread attention in the blogosphere, Tragic Legacy is yet to be reviewed, or even mentioned, by any major newspaper or magazine.

(2) In addition to the excerpts already published at Salon, HuffingtonPost, and Antiwar.com, there will be new excerpts published later today and tomorrow at Crooks & Liars and AmericaBlog, including excerpts relating to the failed terrorist plots in England and Scotland and the standard exploitation of those plots by Bush followers. I will add the links once they are available.

(3) I will be on the Sam Seder Show this afternoon at 5:00 p.m. Eastern, along with a blogger who calls himself "Atrios" or something like that, and two other guests. Local listings and/or live audio feed can be heard here. For those in the San Diego area, I will be on KLSD (AM-1360) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific with Craig Elsten.

(4) Beginning tomorrow, TPM Book Club will host a week-long discussion of the Iran chapter of Tragic Legacy, with a panel that will include, among others, Ezra Klein and Seth Gitell of The New York Sun. I will post more details once the discussion begins.

(5) For those interested, I was interviewed by Scott Horton several days ago for roughly 45 minutes, and the podcast can be heard here.

UPDATE: Several commenters point out that this Washington Post column today by Joel Achenbach, which includes an excellent discussion of the virtues of doubt and its wholesale absence from the Bush administration, includes these paragraphs:

Doubt has been all but outlawed in contemporary Washington. Doubt is viewed as weakness. You are expected to hold onto your beliefs even in a hurricane of contradictory data. Believing in something that's not true is considered a sign of character.

The president sets the tone: He told Bob Woodward that he relies on "gut instinct" and said, "I'm not a textbook player. I'm a gut player." Blogger Glenn Greenwald's new book, "A Tragic Legacy," opens with something Bush told journalists last September: "I've never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions." The smart bet: He'll become more convinced yet. He's not the type to slap his forehead and say, "What a bonehead I am!"

In fairness, there have been other columnists who have referenced the book in their discussions, but as is true for books by anyone who is not an integral member of the Beltway media court, books by bloggers are typically ignored by our largest media organs. There are many reasons why the establishment media is incentivized to ignore or minimize the work of political bloggers, and none of them is particularly difficult to discern.


By Glenn Greenwald

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