My dad was a very good gambler. The best bets he made were ones where the suckers other bettors saw the odds differently than they were really.

I’ve argued for a long time that the progressive netroots weighs more in the consciousness of the political class than it does in political reality. I was meaning to do a post on the Political Arithmetik post showing netroots-fave Edwards 4th and stalled when Jeff Jarvis did a much better post for me.

“Boy, those results don’t look like those from Gallup – from the real voters. At the Politics Online conference in Washington a few weeks ago, I remember one of the many pundits there arguing that Hillary has no grass roots support and momentum because you can’t find it in the blogosphere. Well, maybe in one blog.”

The political blogs are all about Edwards and Richardson, and the polls are all about Hillary.

It’s a fundamental mistake to presume that because one narrow slice of the chattering classes (us) happens to be all excited about a candidate – like, say Ned Lamont – that the enthusiasm is shared by the larger electorate.

I think there’s a lesson there for the netroots – especially the wannabe political consultant class netroots – and I’ll cite my perennial source John Schaar:

“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”

My Examiner column is up – “Why liberalism matters in an age of excess”

…our new Gilded Age risks both ruining the republic, as those forced out of the game withdraw their political and social allegiance … and ruining our economy as those who are winning the game focus on capturing value rather than creating it.

Tim O”Reilly has a post up on building more civility into blogging.

His suggestions are:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.

2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.

3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.

4. Ignore the trolls.

5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.

6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.

7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

As someone who supports having a civil blog, I ought to be 100% in support. But I’m not quite…#1 I do support, but possibly not the others. Which is somewhat self-contradictory, I know.

Thoughts?

Ali Allawi’s book ‘The Occupation of Iraq‘.

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country – a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”

“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.

I’ve got a high tolerance for incompetence and mismanagement – since much of human history seems to be based on it – and so I don’t throw my hands up in despair when people talk about how incompetent the occupation has been.

But if we’re going to get better at it, we’d better list and learn from our mistakes.

Who is Kathleen Parker, and what century is she living in?

A column in the Washington Post:

On any given day, one isn’t likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He’s a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug — not to put too fine a point on it.

But he was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles.

Why, because toddlers don’t have fathers?

She dismissed the effectiveness of women in combat:

Women may be able to push buttons as well as men can, but the door-to-door combat in Fallujah proved the irrelevance of that argument. Meanwhile, no one can look at photos of the 15 British marines and sailors and argue convincingly that the British navy is stronger for the presence of Acting Leading Seaman Faye Turney — no matter how lovely and brave she may be.

She must have missed Sgt. Leah Ann Hester’s story.

Mark Bowden has a brilliant article up in the Atlantic on interrogation in Iraq, and its role in finding Zarqawi.

“We both know what I want,” Doc said. “You have information you could trade. It is your only source of leverage right now. You don’t want to go to Abu Ghraib, and I can help you, but you have to give me something in trade. A guy as smart as you – you are the type of Sunni we can use to shape the future of Iraq.” If Abu Haydr would betray his organization, Doc implied, the Americans would make him a very big man indeed.

There was no sign that the detainee knew he was being played. He nodded sagely. This was the kind of moment gators live for. Interrogation, at its most artful, is a contest of wits. The gator has the upper hand, of course. In a situation like the one at Balad, the Task Force had tremendous leverage over any detainee, including his reasonable fear of beating, torture, lengthy imprisonment, or death. While gators at that point were not permitted even to threaten such things, the powerless are slow to surrender suspicion. Still, a prisoner generally has compelling reasons to resist. He might be deeply committed to his cause, or fear the consequences of cooperation, if word of it were to reach his violent comrades.

Stuff like this is why it’s worth it to subscribe to the Atlantic.

…from $13,000 in pledges. Not as good as I’d hoped, not as bad as I feared.

If someone would go over and pledge $100, we’d be over $13,000.

Just click here…

I’ll do a link roundup tonight when I’m done with work.

So I did my first-ever live radio interview today in support of VictoryPAC, with a conservative talk radio host named Vicki McKenna on the air in Madison. She commented that as a conservative in Madison she understood what it was like to be a liberal hawk – somewhat isolated. I disagreed, and pointed her at the Euston Manifesto and worked in Norm Geras.

Apparently I didn’t suck, because I’m invited back to her Friday morning show in Milwaukee, on WISN.

If it’s going to be streamed, I’ll let everyone know.

VictoryPAC is over $12,000, by the way…I’m chasing new videos tonight.

They shipped my computer 3/31. It’ll be here tomorrow.

Pretty darn good, once they got engaged.

Q: “What would you like to say to those who want American troops to leave Iraq tomorrow?”

A:

“I can only imagine the tragic consequences that would follow…and the blood… and the price we’d have to pay….a disaster…”

Let’s do something about it.I’m a liberal Democrat (pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro-progressive taxation, pro-equal rights, pro-environmental regulation, pro-public schools) who supported and supports the war in Iraq. As I tell my liberal friends “Did I miss the part where it was progressive not to fight medieval religious fascists?”

I’ve been waiting for four years for the White House to start really explaining the war to the American people, and to do anything sensible at all to maintain the political capital necessary to keep America in the fight – to keep us from withdrawing because the war is too messy, or too long, or just plain makes us feel bad.

During that time I was blogging about the war and issues around it here, felt I was doing my part, and hoped that the leadership of the country would wake up and realize that public support for hard things – like wars – must be earned and maintained.

I’ve given up, and decided that it’s up to each of us to start doing more. To that end, I’ve decided to start a PAC that will offer support to Congressional candidates of either party who support a foreign policy that doesn’t involve wishing problems away. Not necessarily support for the invasion of Iraq, or blind allegiance to White House policies – but some plan that’s better than taking our ball and going home and leaving the country and region to become a bloodbath that will assuredly spread to our shores. All I ask is that they have some clue as to what we should do about violent radicalism in the Islamic world other than surrender, withdraw, and hope for the best.

Here in California, defeated Gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides (who I used to work for, by the way…) has decided to raise $10,000 to “send President Bush a message” – among other things he’s threatened to use the funds to run ads in districts of anti-withdrawal Members of Congress.

(see here)

I plan to try and raise $30,000 over the next week – it will have to be pledges right now, since I don’t have a PAC yet – $10,000 for third-party legal and accounting for the next year (to set the PAC up and do the accounting necessary to make sure that we’re in compliance with election laws), and $20,000 to counter Angelides’ ads. If we can succeed at that, we’ll take it a step further and see if we can raise enough money to rattle some cages in this election cycle.

What we’ll be doing is – among other things – running short videos like the one above that I’ll be getting from friends in Iraq – I’ve asked them to simply film a message they would send in responses to Americans who want to withdraw right now.

Next up will be videos from former troops (if you know any, send their contact info my way), military families, and experts on the Middle East.

Once we get over this hurdle, I intend to build a web community of support that candidates we support can use for fundraising, finding volunteers, and reaching out to surrogates – like veterans, military families, and experts on the Middle East.

Go to www.victorypac.org and help out.

Thanks in advance for helping…

Marc “Armed Liberal” Danziger