“Nothing from Wilson and FDR, who as I recall had a thing or two to do with our most successful modern wars.”

What, exactly, was World War I successful at? I mean, other than killing people and devastating large swaths of Europe?

Thanks, Fred, for the support and the discussion.

You’re right that the current search results for “abortion” aren’t all that objectionable at the moment. When I wrote down the targets for the bombing, the deceptive abortionfacts-dot-com was the #1 result, above the evenhanded religioustolerance.org discussion. I’m actually not sure why the reversal came about—it isn’t because of the GoogleBombing; I suggested GynPages as the target for “abortion.”

In any case, even though there has been this welcome change, I’d still like to encourage people to GoogleBomb abortion with GynPages. Roughly, the reason why is this: religioustolerance.org isn’t an offensive result the way that abortiontv-dot-com or abortionfacts-dot-com is, but I do think that (1) since the relative positioning between #1 and #2 is fragile, we should see what we can do to boost alternatives to the deceptive anti-abortion sites; and (2) GynPages provides something very important that religioustolerance doesn’t: it’s a direct link to objective information on where to find abortion services. That’s one reason that people may be searching on “abortion” in the first place, and if it is it’s important that they be able to find it. As it stands, though, it’s crowded out by a bunch of political advocacy at the top of the search results—both even-handed and anti-tilted, and a few times pro-choice-tilted. That’s something that I wouldn’t mind seeing changed at all, and I hope that others agree with me.

I should say that none of this is to quibble with the idea of having John Kerry as Senate Minority Leader; I think that would have been a far better idea than the idiot notion that ended up being pushed through. I just don’t think that preparing the ground for the Kerry 2008 campaign is any reason for supporting the plan; if it increases the likelihood of a Kerry 2008 run, I think that’s more of a reason to worry about it than a reason to support it.

“Despite the conventional wisdom that a loser can’t run again and win, we have proof to the contrary as recently as Nixon and, at a local level, we see it all the time (think Thune, Giuliani). Kerry ran a good race and could win in 2008 when he’s not facing an incumbent.”

But I don’t want Kerry to win in 2008, and neither does a lot of the Democratic base. Kerry’s big draw as a candidate in 2004 was that he (1) wasn’t Bush, and (2) he was a liberal-enough candidate that lefty Democrats thought was “electable” where the candidate they actually wanted (say, Howard Dean) wasn’t. And, well, we saw how well that panned out. We’ve got a full four years to work on this stuff for the next election; can’t we at least spend a few years working for what we want to happen before we have buckle down to what we think we’ll have to settle for?