Dana Blankenhorn

What Hath Bush Wrought

Today, during the final weekend of the Bush Administration, let us pause a moment to consider what George W. Bush has actually accomplished. In a perverse way it is quite impressive.

1. George W. Bush has united America.

Just about all of us hate his guts. Most Americans have good reason to. Republicans will soon join us when they see the wreckage of all they held dear.

2. George W. Bush has shown America the face of evil.

Americans have always believed ourselves to be the good guys, because we said so. We have a very moral history. Bush showed the difference between saying "freedom" and acting in support of it. He is a caricature of our own worst selves, and we gradually came to understand how profoundly awful we can appear to others.

True evil really is banal. It is incurious. It is self-righteous. It is arrogant in its assumption that it is the opposite of what it appears. All this describes the 43rd President, and his Vice President. As we learned during the recent campaign it also describes his core supporters.

3. George W. Bush discredited a generation's political assumptions.

The Nixon Thesis of Conflict is now well and truly dead. George W. Bush did more than any Democrat could ever do to destroy it, and discredit it. The assumption of being surrounded was finally seen for the paranoia it was. The desire for domestic enemies was finally see for the bigotry and pettiness it was. Trickle-down economics was completely discredited, and the southern base of the party is finally seen to be the racist bunch it is.

4. George W. Bush showed that American power cannot be given, it must be taken by the people.

This is a very important lesson, one he has in common with our nation's greatest failures. Lyndon B. Johnson was given power through the Kennedy Assassination and used his mandate to go beyond where America was willing to go. Herbert Hoover practically inherited the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt from Coolidge, as James Buchanan had inherited the ghost of Jackson. When power comes to you, rather than your going to power, it's a danger signal. Remember that, always America.

The Moment of Greatest Opportunity

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 3 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Hard as it is for you to believe moments like this, when times are darkest, are those offering the greatest opportunity.

1. Everything we value in California grew up during the Great Depression -- its farm belt, its media, avionics and technology all date from the 1930s. Even Las Vegas.
2. Apple and Microsoft grew up alongside the recession of the early 1980s.
3. Google emerged from the dot-bomb at the start of this decade.

What can we learn from successes like these? The people behind them were passionate first about the product, then about the customer experience, and only later about the money. None of their creators listened to the pundits of their time. They focused on doing something they felt needed doing for its own sake.

We know what our country needs. What's lacking is the imagination and drive to make it happen. Or what seems to be lacking -- I have no doubt that there are people, right now, out of sight of both this blog and the TV cameras -- working on solutions.

You should be one of them.

So let's look at some of our most intractable problems, and then you look for ways to solve them:

Ending the Paper

This spring will mark a sad milestone at our home.

We're ending our newspaper subscription.

I was trained as a newsman. While a magazine major I took most of the newspaper courses at Medill. The idea of starting the day without a paper seems strange to me.

But for the last several years I have been the one lobbying to end it. My dear wife liked the comics. After merging its two editions in 2001 the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had two full pages of comics, and she enjoyed nothing more at the end of a hard day of work than relaxing with them.

This week the AJC announced it was "improving" its comics. It was going to color reproduction. But to "pay" for the "upgrade" it was killing about half the strips.

This, for my wife, was the last straw. She has finally agreed with me that the need for a daily newspaper is over.

Obviously many people feel the same way. In 2001 the AJC offered home delivery statewide. Then it shrank back to the Atlanta metro, and this week shrank further, to just the city and its nearest suburbs.

Other papers are in similar straits. After years of delivering 30 percent returns on equity by squeezing salaries and other costs, newspaper customers have awoken to the fact that we can live quite well without them. The Detroit papers are eliminating all home delivery except for weekends. Other metros are going to go dark this year -- they will become paperless.

There's no news there anymore. Even state and local headlines are readily available on both newspaper and TV web sites. Sports have moved entirely to TV, as has entertainment. The ads have practically disappeared along with the stores those ads were for. Department stores, gone. Car dealers, gone. Real estate agents, gone. And if you need classifieds there is Craigslist.

Could this have been prevented? Yes.

Leadership under the Internet Thesis

Most of the work done here on political philosophy has covered the past. (To the right, President Richard Nixon and his eventual successor, in Miami, 1968.)

That is now about to change.

With the dawn of the Internet Thesis on Tuesday we are in uncharted territory. Fortunately I have already begun charting it for you.

One important insight, already delivered to those wise enough to stop here regularly, is that with every generation a new central medium emerges. What mass market books were to the Civil War Era, newspapers were to the Progressive Era, movies and radio were to the Liberal Era, and TV was to the Nixon Era just ended.

A corollary to this is that the locus of policy also changes. The Nixon Era was marked by the dominance of think tanks, the Liberal Era by universities, the Progressive Era by publishers, the Civil War Era by bankers and writers.

Today's dominant medium, of course, is the Internet. But this implies more than you get your news through a series of tubes.

It implies a different source of ideas, and legitimacy. As I often write here, you're soaking in it. It's the social network. Ideas percolate to the fore through social networking.

The Obama people have sought to bottle this change in a site called (naturally) Change.Gov. So here's the first big insight of our new era.

It won't work. But they're on the right track.

Is Heart Disease also Diabetes?

The most popular post I did at ZDNet Healthcare last year had the provocative title "Diabetes is also Heart Disease."

The story was based on studies showing how diabetes ravages the heart. Doctors recommend that diabetics recognize this damage and treat themselves as heart patients.

Today I'm asking, without a lot of studies to back me up, whether the reverse might also be true. I'm asking the question here, rather than at my paid job, because all I have to go on is my own example.

Let's start with the fact I didn't post here yesterday.

How to Fight Crime

Americans are scared of crime. Rightly so.

Economic collapse brings with it all the horsemen of the apocalypse. Hopelessness hardens hearts. Those who have been dehumanized dehumanize.

In the middle of a collapse there is not much to do. You have to defend your own. And with police services being cut, people feel trapped.

This is as true in my own neighborhood as anywhere else. The city cuts back, and so do citizens. The best ideas can go a-glimmering. I got a good example of what happened last week. Someone saw a red truck leaving a crime scene. E-mails flew looking for a red truck. Someone saw one, going through the neighborhood. Someone else got its license plate. Was this the red truck? No one knew, and no one seemed willing to ask. Instead they sent these e-mails, labeled BOLO, and scared each other.

Funny, though. When I was at our community meeting last night the answer was sitting on a table. I picked it up.

The Real Manchurian Candidate

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 2 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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As we reach the final days of the Bush Junta's misrule, it appears (more and more often) that he and his family have never worked for America but for its enemies.

In The Manchurian Candidate, this was done through a complex  plot involving the brainwashing of a young Army officer (Laurence Harvey), a ruthless double agent (Angela Lansbury) and her fool of a husband (James Gregory). Spoiler alert. It was Gregory (the one on the left here) who was the candidate, a drunk and incurious fool whose rise was driven by attacking the very people he would work for.

The movie's most vivid image is of a playing card, the Queen of Hearts, which Lansbury would show Harvey in order to hypnotize him and give him his orders.

In real life we had no Harvey, and no Frank Sinatra to save us. The plot succeeded. The evidence is all around you.

Those tempted to show a Queen of Hearts to George W. Bush at one of his last press conferences are missing the point. He's Gregory, not Harvey. He never required a lot of handling. Just point him where you want and he goes.

In the real version of this horror show Dick Cheney is Lansbury (or is it possible his father, George H.W. Bush, is Lansbury), and there is no real underground plot, no playing card at all. Everyone is doing what they are doing with their eyes wide open. Because they are not working for North Korea. They're not Communists.

They're Arabists.

Burying Hoover

I had thought Herbert Hoover, and his politics, were dead and buried until I opened my newspaper yesterday.

Consumers are pulling back. Reducing debt. Businesses are pulling back. Reducing debt. We’re hunkering down.

So, what does our government propose? More of the same. Except bigger, bolder.

“It’s politics as usual on steroids,” says Doug Williams, president and chief executive of Atlantic Capital Bank, who’s gaining notice for opting not to participate in the government’s bailout program.

Not that there is any compelling, or even halfway compelling, evidence that this spending will stimulate the economy. But it sounds good, and after all, that’s what’s important.

The author was Tom Oliver, a reporter I knew vaguely when I was on the business beat here in 1982. A follower then, he's a follower now, which is how he got to be the last one standing at the AJC business desk. And what he's following is the basic Republican kant now being used against the Obama economic program. Hoovernomics.

Which is based entirely on a lie, a lie I boldfaced. When everyone is selling you buy. When no one is spending the government must. Or else, as the Republicans suggest, we can sit around for a decade and wait for a pony.

There is more than ample evidence that spending stimulates the economy. That's what the whole "experiment" called the Great Depression was about, Skeezix. Germany, Italy and Japan did a lot more stimulus than we did, got a lot more growth, and became the Axis powers who nearly destroyed us in World War II, which prompted our government to do its own stimulus, also called arming ourselves to the teeth.

What we learned afterward is that stimulus-through-arms is inefficient. The Apollo Program was a much more effective economic stimulus, as was the Interstate Highway system. While approved based on arguments of national security and cold war, both brought with them enormous economic growth, creating our suburbs and the Internet among other things. (Not to mention Tang!)

Make Them Own It

Having been politically active for a full generation, having covered the Internet since 1985, online politics since 1996 and having been part of the Netroots since 2003, I enter the new era with a question never asked by liberals in my lifetime:

Now that we're in power what is our role?

The answer to that question lies in the hearts of the people you have beaten.

Make them own it.

Let's break that down into its component parts, because they are all important:

• Make means force, compel, staying on the case without rest and without mercy. It means you're the hammer, they're the nail, from now to the end of time. We are all Simon Wiesenthal now, and the criminals of the Bush Regime are the Nazis.
• Them means not just those in the Bush Regime who gave us these horrors, but all their enablers, including those in the media and those Democrats who let them get away with it.
• Own means you don't let them weasel out of their responsibility, now or ever. These people must not only be exiled, but kept out, forever. Note what the Reagan people did to Carterism (even though Jimmy Carter was a wise man decades ahead of his time). Hit them harder, longer, destroy them more thoroughly than Carter was destroyed.
• It means everything. The financial scandals. The Iraq War. The torture, the renditions, the eviscerating of the Constitution. All the actions of a government contemptible of government. Not only the actions, but the attitudes, and the ideology behind them, must be destroyed, called off limits by all future historians.

There is a difference between this work and the job of supporting the new Administration. The two tasks will diverge increasingly over time.

President Obama is going to take actions, and do business with people, whom we in the Netroots can't abide. He needs to hear our displeasure, respectfully. Let him know that we know, that we disapprove, that he is paying a price. But remember in this that he's our guy, so pick your spots. And be ready to back down.

Some good examples have been seen in the cabinet process. There was too much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the fact that many appointees to political positions had actual experience in politics, usually in the Clinton White House. Experience is not a disqualifier, not necessarily, but if that experience mainly consisted of putting down liberal ideas on behalf of conservative ones, we have a problem.  There are differences in tactics, as between Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean. Then there are differences in policy. That's where we pounce.

The best examples in this week's news are the anger over Leon Panetta and Sanjay Gupta. The first is a test we're now passing, no small thanks to Rachel Maddow, who is becoming a real North Star on how to react in these matters. (Why NBC is doing to her what Republicans did to Sarah Palin is another blog post.) The second is a test we may yet fail, as those who wish to make the perfect the enemy of the good give the President friendly fire that can only help our enemies.

But there is a far more important part of the task I need to emphasize.

The Big Lie About Lawyers

There is a big lie about lawyer every lawyer knows but which reporters continue to spread nonetheless.

Lawyers are not miracle workers.

Some lawyers are better than others. Some lawyers blow cases. Other lawyers win cases they might not otherwise. But even the best lawyers can lose when the facts and the law are against them. Even a bad lawyer can win if the facts and the law are with them.

There's a great example in today's news. The Free Software Foundation, having failed to negotiate a settlement for some obvious violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Cisco Systems, has sued. So here were lawyers being quoted as saying Cisco might actually win in court, because they have such good lawyers.

Not going to happen. Cisco has no case. They are hanging tough in order to keep the settlement costs down. A stupid thing to do, in the long run, because they're losing credibility and goodwill every day the suit goes on.

But they are free to be stupid. Maybe they believe the lie as well. Doesn't make it true.