This morning Google started at $404 per share, which means lots of people with money believed Google was worth $120 billion
-- roughly half what we say we have spent on the Iraq War so far. Fourteen months ago, when Google went public -- trembling, at $100 a share -- American soldier number 1,000 died in Iraq.
A year ago eight million Americans claimed to have posted blogs and 14 million of us comments, images or links. Last year lurking on blogs grew by more than half -- to 27 percent of America's 120 million Internet users.
Among all political blogs, every available objective measure says dailykos.com is the biggest dog that ever was. Senators and congresspeople, CIA analysts, jihadists and creepy Karl Rove kids visit this site regularly and contribute, bet your last dollar on that. Why? Because some of the sharpest tools in America's shed work the garden here regularly -- by the thousands.
So what role might dailykos.com play in the Reconstruction of America?
When Ronald Reagan was president, just under half of us had access to cable TV. Reagan-era surfing was grim: CNN, INN, another Turner product, sports, local broadcast stations and a PBS affiliate if you were lucky. Today, half of us have access to high-speed Internet service.
I believe CNN deserves more credit for ending the Cold War than anything Reagan's gangsters ever smelled like. CNN could have landed as epochal a role in the Middle East today but Al Jazeera, which adapted CNN's pre-Time Warner model and mantle, has long beaten them to it.
Inside the U.S., cable-TV dominates public discourse and cable-TV style radically influences national politics and international policy. How much discussion here is inspired by cable-TV content? What Novak says on Crossfire still matters. Okay, bad example. What Howard Stern says... uh...
Cable-TV invented its earnest-verging-on-alarmed "style" in order to distract viewers from the vast wasteland of its own channels long enough to see a commercial. Today it is the news industry standard, the burning ambition of a weekly newspaper reporter I know in rural southwest Georgia and I've seen it mimicked perfectly by no-name real estate developers pitching state-of-the-local-economy PowerPoints. It is its own parody, Stephen Colbert's artful antics notwithstanding.
That style easily substitutes form for substance, a willful deceit that corrupts the architecture of mainstream broadcast news, from its predilection for compelling visual imagery over context to blatant artifice -- remember the NBC reporter paddling her canoe in floodwaters as workers hiked across her camera ankle-deep? How far removed was she from Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, Sami Al-Arien or plastic Thanksgiving turkey served au Bush?
Cable-TV restructured the grammar of newspeak. Every anonymous source from Scooter Libby to minimum-wage parking lot attendants and condo association board candidates knows off-the-record. Worse, to accommodate all the Judith Millers, Jason Blairs and Rupert Murdochs swilling its ranks, it corrupts fundamental ethics of the news profession as baldly as Blackbeard blockaded Charleston.
Worst of all, "modern" news contrives sensational narratives that appeal to our prurient nature, then shelves them in widget-sized 70-second performance blocks, side-by-side with seminal political choices that alter the lives and deaths of broad groups of human beings, one next to the other, interchangeable parts: brand an idea, present a response and pass judgment -- like passing gas, when we don't have context enough to form a perspective, much less articulate one.
During the 2006 election, more than 50 million voters will seek candidate information from the Internet. Most assuredly the netroots, blogs in particular and, in a substantial way, contributors to this web site will effect elections in ways unimagined by John F. Kennedy and underestimated by John Kerry.
By the election of 2008 -- which started a year ago -- dailyKos.com may well emerge as the single most effective resource informing, educating and activating potential voters -- more effective at facilitating positive change in America than churches, the Swiftboat armada, Diebold or terrorist alerts (Graphic: CondiScowling32.jpg).
That's not as preposterous as it might seem -- 50 million Americans sought candidate information from the Internet in the 2004 election, and I'm no MeteorBlades, but my five-figure UID, once an embarrassing sign of my tender feet, now ranks me among his old-school third here (though no less naïve than before).
Extrapolate this community's growth curve and a quarter-million registered users with daily page views in the tens of millions is not unreasonable by November 2008. Extrapolate Americans' use of the Internet for political news and information and active netroots participants might top 100 million -- that's roughly 500 national political conventions occurring simultaneously, 24/7, and it means a radical realignment of public discourse.
If this community continues to grow, principles and ideas proposed, analyzed and debated here will play a formative role in America's Reconstruction.
We have launched the last battles of our modern civil war -- not the one in history class, though many of the ideas sound awfully familiar.
Craven manipulation of natural disasters and foreign wars to enhance political advantage and facilitate profiteering, crass appeals to patriotic ideals to mask corruption wanting investigation at almost every level, the parceling out of our national resources, the squandering of our faith and credit and betrayal of centuries-old democratic ideals have rendered severe collateral damage to our Constitution, to American influence as an international leader and to our individual and collective human responsibility to leave this world a better place. Our economy, trenchantly analyzed almost daily on this site, and our American identity -- beyond the bold, beautiful parts often expressed here -- are likewise casualties that require extensive rehabilitation.
I believe our civil war is in its final phase. I believe the grandiose, greedy delusions that defined our new millennium are eclipsed by their own hubris. I don't believe Bush or Cheney either one will see a day of 2009 from inside the White House.
We are already articulating America's Reconstruction in crude terms that vary from vague to silly: in December, 2005 some of us are yet discussing what amounts to a statement of principles -- the sorts of declarative sentences each of us ought to be able to spout off the top of our heads. We have accommodated cable-TV's style so long we are so inured to our brutalization we sometimes doubt our own senses.
America's Reconstruction will be much more fully articulated in 2008, and with a Democratic majority in Congress, we might already be seeing some of the results by then.
We Democrats, liberals, progressive-minded people, the disaffected and a horde of people who still color themselves "moderate" will struggle to find ways to repair the growing disaster that is our own government.
As that process evolves, dailyKos.com is positioned best to serve as a model -- maybe the model -- for formative expressions of American democracy: a town square visible to the entire world that does for political discourse what Google does for finding shit out quick.
If dailyKos.com can generate that perception and achieve that reality without dulling our most powerful weapon -- the diversity of opinion and grammar of intellect and compassion that dominates here -- dailykos.com might well save civilization from self-destruction.
That process -- that Reconstruction of America -- makes dailyKos.com worth way more than Google today, by my count. So I'm buying Markos' book and a t-shirt for my wife, and I'm taking careful notes so I'll tell the story properly to any grandkids that get here before dada or dotage overtake me.