What's the Difference Between Mike Rounds and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a blog.

The Iranian president started his blog in August, 2006. With enough radical reality-denying theocrats to fight here at home, I haven't spent a lot of time surfing the Persian web, so I didn't learn about Ahmadinejad's blog until the URL cropped up in a study I'm reading on e-government. How very surreal to have even that tiny window into a dictator's mind, right at our fingertips.

Compare that executive blogging effort to our own governor, who hardly uses e-mail. Of course, it's probably a little easier for me to walk into Rounds's office and chat without being tortured and executed.

President Ahmadinejad hasn't been keeping up with the "publish or perish" dictum of blogging: in a year and a half, he managed only 13 posts -- none since last December. Maybe we need to encourage him to get online more often: after all, every minute he spends at the keyboard is a minute he's not making nuclear weapons. Maybe President Bush could secure his legacy (and that Nobel Peace Prize he just got nominated for) by promulgating the Facebook Doctrine: get evil dictators addicted to the Internet so they don't have time to make actual geopolitical trouble:

Honey, do you have time to ship those weapons of mass destruction to Syria?

No, dear, I'm busy uploading photos of our last Axis of Evil convention -- oh! and Putin and Mugabe just added me as a friend on Facebook!

If only foreign policy were that easy.