Bruner Blog

In my ongoing effort to be recognized as the premier blogger of the NY NPR affiliate radio station WNYC, let me be the first to link to the 19-minute audio interview from this morning’s Brian Lehrer Show with über blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Smart comments all around (Reynolds is a law professor, after all, so it’s not surprising he’s quite articulate when speaking, in addition to in writing). Highlights:

• Libertarian though he is (often deemed simply a “conservative,” which he rejects), Reynolds thinks Kerry has a decent chance of winning, especially if he gets tougher about “The War on Terror.”

• He thinks the U.S. should simply bribe foreign countries (notably France) to participate in the war. INTERVIEW’S BEST QUOTE: “It seems that any coalition that doesn’t include France gets called unilateral, no matter how many other countries it involves. Britain doesn’t seem to count, Australia doesn’t seem to count, Poland doesn’t seem to count. But apparently as long as France is included we are then being multilateral. I don’t know, maybe we could buy a bunch of Airbus plane and use them as decoy Air Force Ones or something…. I know they’re supporting Robert Mugabe because he’s planning to lease a lot of airplanes from them. They seem to maybe be changing their position under pressure now on Sudan, they seem to have been pretty supportive there, though French oil interests are involved as well. So I think we ought to take that bribery approach into account in the future. Perhaps if we decide to invade Iran or Saudi Arabia, we should just tell France, ‘Look, Total Fina Elf will get half the oil concessions,’ and I think then we’ll find it will be no trouble to be multilateral.”
• On the significance of blogs: “A.J. Liebling famously said, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.’” (That one’s good enough to have a place of honor on my blog’s sidebar from now on.)
• On promoting his blog: “I had no PR plan, and certainly no PR budget. [Emailed some friends when it started and use to email journalists early on. After that, it was just] “….people finding me on their own. Which has to be frightening to professional marketers.”
• On why he is not attending the conference: “I wasn’t convinced that I had the requisite Hunter S. Thompson kind of flair to produce anything that would be especially interesting.”
• He reiterates his position that he supports Bush dumping Dick Cheney in favor of Condoleeza Rice for VP in 2004.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2004 at 4:30 pm and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.