John Cassidy's Blog, page 50

The Round of Sixteen: Tension, Drama, And Penalties

As you’ve probably gathered by now, the round of sixteen is when things at the World Cup gets serious—deadly serious. The group stage is a festival. Nations from all over come together, and soccer fans, many of whom have saved up for years to make the trip, celebrate. Of course, the supporters want their teams to progress—they are desperate for them to progress—but being there and experiencing the tournament is the main thing.

With the host nation entirely given over to soccer for a month, it’s immersive experience, much like going away to camp—a camp that encompasses an entire country. You talk soccer, eat soccer, drink soccer, sleep soccer, and, in your odd free moments, do a bit of sight-seeing or sunbathing.

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A Very Un-American Triumph

How do you celebrate a loss? The English, who have long glorified their country’s valiant second-place finishers, don’t have a problem with it. But Americans? Surely, we are all about winning, coming out on top, stomping the other guy’s face into the dirt. To lose is to be a loser—a term of opprobrium I only learned after moving across the Atlantic. Isn’t cheering a team of losers an un-American activity?

Not necessarily—at least, not in the World Cup, where the initial stage of the competition is conducted in groups rather than on a knockout basis. But it does take a bit of getting used to, as we discovered today, when Team U.S.A. progressed to the next stage of the tournament despite losing to Germany, 1–0, in the rain-sodden city of Recife, on Brazil’s northeast coast.

“The United States have one hundred per cent earned the right to get out of this group,” Taylor Twellman, a retired soccer player who was serving as ESPN’s color commentator, intoned as the match drew to an end. And he went on, “Nobody, and I mean nobody, thought they had a chance in this group.” The U.S. players and Jürgen Klinsmann, their coach, may quarrel with the latter point, but Twellman was broadly right. According to FIFA’s official ranking, Germany is the second-best team in the world, and Portugal is the fourth-best. Team U.S.A. is ranked thirteenth, yet overcame the odds and progressed.

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The Supreme Court Gets It Right on Cell-Phone Privacy

It’s not so often these days that I write anything favorable about the Supreme Court. But here’s a quick shout-out to Wednesday’s ruling from the Justices, a unanimous one, that the police need a warrant to search the cell phone, or other digital device, of a person they arrest. For once, John Roberts, who wrote the decision, and all of his colleagues appear to be on the right side of history.

Last year, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the broader concerns about the tracking activities of companies like Facebook and Google, it was widely agreed that we needed to have a vigorous public debate about privacy rights, and how, and where, they should be extended to the digital age. (I was one of those who justified Snowden’s leaks partly on these grounds.) Of course, it’s lot easier to call for a debate than it is to resolve one. How far should spying agencies be allowed to monitor the communications of American citizens who aren’t suspected of terrorist activity? How much information about your online activities should Internet companies be allowed to share with advertisers? Is it O.K. for auto companies to install in vehicles G.P.S. technology that tracks your every movement, and then retain this information?

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Luis Suárez Chews His Way Out of the World Cup

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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The Day America Fell in Love with the World Cup

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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Iraq Mission Raises More Questions Than It Answers

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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Adios to the Tiki-Taka Men

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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Economics World Cup: Stagnationists 1, Optimists 0

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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Tony Blair’s New Call to Arms

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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The Iraq Mess: Place Blame Where It Is Deserved

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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