I wasn’t going to write about the World Cup today. Honestly, I wasn’t. When I sat down at my desk this morning, I had more serious things on my mind: the G.O.P. primary runoff in Mississippi, the phone-hacking verdicts in London, and the ongoing debate about the Federal Reserve’s policy. But there’s something about this tournament that won’t let you get on with your normal life.
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Let me guess. A day after Cristiano Ronaldo’s last-minute wonder pass denied Team U.S.A. a guaranteed place in the last sixteen at the World Cup, you are still feeling a little bit deflated. It just wasn’t fair, was it?
All that hard work after handing Portugal the gift of an early lead. The U.S. team was playing, quite possibly, its best game ever. The midfielder Jermaine Jones scored a thumping equalizer from outside the penalty box, and, in the eighty-first minute, the center forward Clint Dempsey bundled a go-ahead goal over the line. Portugal was done, or so it appeared. Cristiano Ronaldo, recently voted the best player in the world, was nowhere to be seen, and Chris Wondolowski, who substituted for Dempsey late in the match, repeatedly ran the ball into the Portugal corner flag—a classic time-wasting maneuver. The five minutes of time added for injuries and stoppages were almost up. In the Arena Amazonia, in the sweltering city of Manaus, twenty-thousand-plus Americans had their eyes fixed on the referee, urging him to blow the final whistle. Then Michael Bradley, who had played a great game, lost the ball in midfield. It went out to Ronaldo on the right wing. He looked up and curled in a cross that eluded the U.S. defense, and—no, no, this couldn’t be happening!—his colleague Silvestre Varela, racing from the center circle, headed it into the net with the last touch of the game.
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Has a U.S. leader ever dispatched a military force overseas with less enthusiasm than President Obama displayed in the White House briefing room on Thursday, where he announced that he’s sending three hundred military personnel to Iraq? Not that I can recall.
Throughout his question-and-answer session, Obama talked in a soft, almost resigned voice, giving the impression that he’d rather do almost anything else than direct Americans soldiers to return to Baghdad and northern Iraq. But despite his description of the U.S. mission as one of advising and supporting the Iraqi government forces rather than doing the fighting, that’s what he’s done.
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All great teams eventually meet their nemesis. The all-conquering 1961-62 Yankees, which included Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Yogi Berra, turned into the 1965-67 Yankees, which failed to win eighty games for three seasons in a row. The Chicago Bulls of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen metamorphosed into the Chicago Bulls of Ron Artest and Eddy Curry. Rarely, though, have we witnessed a sporting sunset as sudden and dramatic as the one that has come down on Spain’s soccer team at this year’s World Cup.
After losing to Holland last week by the shocking margin of five goals to one—the worst defeat in history for a reigning World Cup champion—Spain lost again on Wednesday, and was eliminated from the tournament. Chile, who is nobody’s favorite to win the Cup, beat the Spanish handily, going up two goals in the first half and never looking threatened. As the minutes ticked by and the Spanish team members looked increasingly dejected, Steve McManaman, the loquacious Liverpudlian who serves as ESPN’s color man, said, “They deserve to be out.” For once, nobody could argue with Macca’s analysis. After taking a one-goal lead over Holland in last Friday’s match, Spain allowed seven goals, scored none, and committed the sorts of errors, all over the pitch, that would have embarrassed a much lesser team.
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As the initial series of matches in Brazil draws to an end—and what a series it was—the economics world is also enjoying a clash of heavyweights. In a matchup over the future of the U.S. economy, the Secular Stagnationists are taking on the Good Old-Fashioned Optimists. At this point, midway through the first half, the Stagnationists appear to be ahead, but there is a long way to go.
It’s an eagerly awaited contest between two teams whose prognostications investors and other spectators around the globe watch keenly. Both clubs have somewhat checkered records—all economic forecasters do, to some extent—but they are both stocked with talented and generously recompensed players. The Stagnationists’ team captain is Larry Summers, formerly the director of President Obama’s National Economic Council; the Optimists are led by the current chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman.
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During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Tony Blair, who was then the British prime minister, was a leading voice of the liberal interventionists. Now, with Iraq on the brink of a sectarian civil war, he has reëntered the fray, publishing a long essay calling for military strikes targeted at the jihadis in northern Iraq as part of a broader campaign against the forces of militant Islam. “This does not mean Western troops as in Iraq,” Blair writes. “There are masses of responses we can make short of that. But they need to know that, wherever they’re engaged in terror, we will be hitting them.”
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With Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, firmly under the control of a jihadi group so extreme that it was denounced by Al Qaeda; with government forces battling for Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein; and with the religious leader of Iraq’s Shiites issuing a call to arms at Friday’s prayers, we have reached the moment that skeptics of the 2003 United States invasion warned about all along: the implosion of the country, and, possibly, the entire region. “The state of Iraq is in imminent collapse,” Faisal Istrabadi, formerly a senior Iraqi diplomat, said on Thursday.
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Private Eye, the English satirical magazine, has a make-believe columnist named Dave Spart. He’s a long-haired, mustachioed college lecturer and trades-union activist of Trotskyite inclinations, who’s forever fulminating about cuts in government spending, American foreign policy, and other iniquities. According to legend, Richard Ingrams, the magazine’s editor of many years, created the Spart character based on the views of one of Private Eye’s real-life contributors, the late Paul Foot, a dogged left-wing investigative journalist who was the nephew of Michael Foot, the sometime leader of the Labour Party.
These days, at least in the United States, radicals tend to be located on the other end of the political spectrum, and most of them are cleanly shaven. Enter Dave Brat, a forty-nine-year-old economist at Randolph-Macon College, a small but reputable liberal arts institution in Ashland, Virginia, who on Tuesday defeated Eric Cantor, the reptilian House Majority Leader, in a Republican primary election in Virginia’s seventh congressional district. As news of Bart’s victory came in last night, he was widely portrayed as a right-wing version of Spart—a Tea Party-endorsed, Ayn Rand-spouting, American enragé.
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Shortly after eight on Tuesday night, Twitter went a little nuts, and so, presumably, did Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. The Associated Press, CNN, and other news organizations had just called the Republican primary race in Virginia’s Seventh District for David Brat, a hitherto little-known economics professor who is associated with the Tea Party wing of the G.O.P. Cantor had become the first House Majority Leader to lose a primary renomination.
All over Washington, commentators were called out of dinner; Fox News broke into the O’Reilly Factor; and political reporters struggled to come up with a correct historical analogy. Since virtually no one—or, at least, no one in the world of political forecasting and punditry—had predicted Brat’s victory, it would be presumptuous, at this stage, to say anything definitive about its causes or its consequences. But here are a few things that can’t easily be contested.
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By the time I got to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, at shortly after 9 A.M. on Tuesday, the line for Hillary Clinton’s 11 A.M. book signing stretched around the corner, up Park Avenue South, and down Eighteenth Street. (Apparently, some of the people up front had slept on the sidewalk to get a good place.) Having speculated about Hillary’s goals in publishing a second memoir, “Hard Choices,” which covers her four years as Secretary of State, I was keen to get hold of a copy, and also to witness the former First Lady, Senator for New York, and Secretary of State’s reëntry into retail politics, carefully staged as it would undoubtedly be.
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