Dana Blankenhorn

Coach Lilly

What happened to the U.S. Womens World Cup team this week was sad, but pretty neat in a way.

Sad, because Coach Greg Ryan made a classic mistake, replacing his goalie for a semi-final, and he paid the appropriate price, in that the team was crunched, 4-0 by Brazil.

Pretty neat, because this is the kind of thing which happens to mens' teams all the time, and for once it got the kind of attention we give mens' teams.

This Week's Clue: The Greatest Liberal Value

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 39  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of October 1.

Enjoy.

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Competition.

There is no more important liberal value than competition. Competition among businesses. Competition among ideas. Competition among institutions. Competition among nations.

The biggest lie told by conservatives over the last generation was that liberals did not believe in competition. You can hear this lie in all their rhetoric. They call liberals Communists or Socialists who seek to monopolize the economy on behalf of the state. Or they call liberals elitists who seek to monopolize ideas.

This lie has its roots in McCarthyism. It wasn't just told by Joe McCarthy, but by Pat McCarran, by Walter Judd, most especially by the John Birch Society, which sought to make Mencken's claim  "when fascism comes to America it will be called Americanism" a literal truth.

Most of what is called libertarianism is in fact an attempt by the far right to create a vacuum which will enable their own monopoly on power. (I've studied Ron Paul for almost 40 years, and know whereof I speak.)

The Biggest Lie in Technology

It's a lie that makes my blood boil every time I read it. (This cartoon, by Thomas Nast, is over 110 years old.)

The lie is that the U.S. telecommunications market is competitive, even hyper-competitive.

That lie was told again this week, by the Walt Disney Internet Group, when it announced its MVNO, a re-sale agreement with Sprint, would be closing. (The idiot in charge was engaging in some serious ass-covering.)

This followed similar announcements by Amp'D Mobile and by ESPN, another Disney unit. The only successful MVNO in the U.S. is Virgin Mobile, which is trying to go public in order to pay down its bills.

The plain fact is that the U.S. communications market, wired and wireless, phone, cable and Internet, is an oligopoly with very few participants, and that U.S. consumers have either few or no choices.

The 1967 Game: Who's Agnew Now?

As a generational crisis comes on, and people en masse switch sides, the quality they most want to see is fearlessness.

Ironically it's at these times that fearlessness is in shortest supply.

During the last such crisis, in the late 1960s, it was George Wallace who embodied fearlessness for the Right. This was seen as so vital in holding the new coalition together that Nixon institutionalized his role in the form of Spiro Agnew.

When the scales fell from the eyes of former Democrats in the Long Island suburbs, in the latter years of Lyndon Johnson, it was Wallace whom they first turned to. George C. Wallace (I remember how they liked to put the middle initial in), with his red meat rhetoric, with his disdain for the intellectuals, and yes with his racism.

There is, at times like this, a crying need among new recruits to a political cause for revenge, the equivalent of le guillotine. Wallace delivered that. And then Agnew delivered that. It was Agnew's rhetoric which solidified these former Democrats as lifelong Republicans. They walked the Wallace bridge to Agnew, then to Nixon, then to Reagan, then to Bush.

The same sort of thing is needed today. I know that Digby and John Aravosis and Duncan Black would be angry to be compared with Wallace, because in their politics they are nothing like him, but they are performing that same historic role. Theirs is the red meat rhetoric that former conservatives are using as a bridge to liberalism. They, and other liberal bloggers like Cliff Schechter, are telling it like it is, unafraid, fearlessly. They are, in a rhetorical sense, sticking the opponents' faces in it and mashing down hard. They are going after the press and they are going after the think tanks just as hard as Wallace went after the academy. They are treating the war bloggers like the dirty fucking hippies they in fact are, at least in the context of 2007. (The polite term for these losers are the worst persons in the world.)

This sort of thing is essential in a process of structural political change. This kind of fearless rhetoric won't make you President, but it will allow the next President to ride a rising tide, one based on heart as much as head.

You can see why ambitious politicians would not want this role. Right now only Dennis Kucinich seems really hot to take it on. But Democrats don't want Kucinich. He ran in 2004 to wild laughter -- he actually used the campaign to find a wife --  and the political career of Dennis the Menace has more baggage than the late Leona Helmsley.

I Dream an Inaugural, Less Than 16 Months From Now

I had a dream last night, a possible dream, a dream now less than 16 months away. (One of the Eyeball series, available on DVD via Paypal.)

It was Inauguration Day, unusually warm for Washington in January. The swearing in is done and the new President steps to the microphone.

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Friends, countrymen, countrywomen.

I wish to begin today by quoting from a great Republican President, Gerald Ford, who passed away recently after a long and honored life.

Here is how he began his Presidency:

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.

The Net Don't Lie

One of the most common refrains of TV and newspaper journalism is that the Internet is filled with liars, with criminals, with people who hide their identities and do damage which older media, because they're vetted, can't do.

This is utter nonsense. It is pure sophistry.

First, there is no question whatever that the TV and newspaper industries are subject to corruption. The philosophical beliefs of media owners, for starters. And not just at Fox. Every newspaper owner has its politics, and this determines who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets read.

There is another form of corruption in TV and newspaper journalism, one which is seldom discussed openly. This lies in the nature of their function. The Washington press corps is a small, self-contained village, with no more relation to the real America than any other small, self-contained village. Yet because they talk to policymakers, pundits, and one another -- without any of the rest of us in the room -- Washington reporters assume they know the "true" story of what's going on. They don't. It's a hall of mirrors they live in, one which reflects their own assumptions endlessly, like the fun house at the end of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai.

This is true on every beat, by the way. New York financial journalism is a village. Silicon Valley tech journalism is a village. Los Angeles entertainment journalism is a village. All villages impose a form of censorship on their members, a set of assumptions no one questions. I think I'm a much better tech reporter, writing from Atlanta, than I would be living in Santa Clara, because I'm outside the village.

Nathan Bedford Forrest's Lessons for Liberals

Last week's Moveon mess, which kept all Senate Republicans in line and kept the Iraq War going another full year, has some important lessons for liberals, if they're willing to learn them.

They involve the uses and tactics of rage, a topic Drew Westen has been aiming at in his rather-intellectual book.

I think Westen would have done much better with a title like "Nathan Bedford Forrest's Lessons for Liberals." Forrest (right, from the collection of the University of North Carolina), the Confederate cavalry commander credited with the first rise of the KKK, was a brilliant tactician, and the lessons of his Civil War campaigns still hold important lessons for modern politics.

If a liberal gets mad at my using NBF or the rise of the KKK to offer object lessons to liberals, good.

This gives me an opportunity to briefly explain that rage, whether in the form of a Rebel Yell during battle or in the form of a made-up controversy in political battle, is a vital element in achieving victory. With the proper use of rage, and the tactics of rage, a smaller force can defeat a larger one every time. (It's one of Forrest's.)

Just as the Bushies did last week.

So, now to the lessons:

The Age of Repair

It's always easier to make than to fix. And when something is made it's so easy to take it for granted. (The picture is from the Brownstoner, a great site about renovation in Brooklyn.)

This is true for everything. It's true for roads, it's true for houses, it's true for water, it's true for our bodies, and it's true for the Internet itself.

There are two ways to renew. You can destroy, or you can repair.

Throughout human history we've usually renewed through destruction. People die and new ones are born. Wars eliminate the old systems and we build anew. Then we take what's built for granted, we decline to fix or maintain it, yet after the destruction of a war we go eagerly into the greenfield and we build again, from scratch.

The Great Secret of Our Time is this won't work anymore. We have to repair. We repair ourselves or we die. No one wants to fight a literal war inside the U.S. so we can rebuild it again.

We're entering the Age of Repair.

Mau-Mauing and the Dominant Thesis

Mau-mauing is a great word from the 1960s which deserves to make a comeback.

The word first came into use to describe liberals pressuring the government for civil rights. It was a term of derision, used by conservatives to try and take the sting out of the technique, by associating it with African terrorists.

It worked in the 1960s not because the civil rights movement was right -- which it was -- but because the mau-mauers were appealing to a dominant thesis in American politics. The political assumptions behind the pressure enabled minority stands to gain policy support. It was, in fact, a rather simple form of political terrorism, as people like Tom Wolfe (above) understood.

This is precisely what the Right is up to now. Last week's events are a perfect example. The whole MoveOn contretemps was a classic bit of mau-mauing, and followed a script which has been used repeatedly throughout the year.

1. Find an angry statement from the other side.
2. Ignore the real issue and direct all your fire against the person making the statement.
3. Associate everyone on the other side with the angry speaker.
4. Use the faux issue as an excuse to stand firm against majority opinion.

This Week's Clue: Conservatism's Lesson for the Netroots

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 38  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of September 24.

Enjoy.

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An important lesson was delivered today to the Netroots, one with its roots in The 1967 Game.

Know your enemies.

In the case of the Netroots, their aim is not to just support Democrats. It's to fundamentally change Washington, Democrat and Republican, pundit and press. It is to shift the balance toward what they consider the center, which today is often derided as The Left.

But how far Left can you be when two-thirds of voters agree with you? That's what the Netroots is asking today. And that's what the Conservative Party of the state of New York was saying 40 years ago.

New York Conservatives were extremely frustrated back then. They were being told to get behind liberals like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits in order to stop liberals like Arthur Goldberg. And they had had enough -- that was their slogan by the way. They risked Goldberg to support an unknown named Paul Adams for Governor in 1966, and then ran James L. Buckley against Javits in 1968. Both lost.

But the message was eventually sent, and when liberal Charles Goodell was selected to replace Bobby Kennedy in the Senate, they used the support of the Nixon Administration to get Buckley elected in 1970. (More important, the party steadily gained a veto over the Republican Party apparatus, resulting in Al D'Amato and George Pataki. You may not like them, I did not like them. New York Conservatives loved them, and with reason.)