David Broder is in his 80s. His columns have been pretty much irrelevant to both Right and Left for quite some time. But today he came up with a grand plan to unite the country and boost the economy: War with Iran.

What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

Someone at the Washington Post should have nixed this column before it came out to embarrass Broder and the paper. But maybe WaPo is beyond embarrassing these days.

And, one more time, war does not improve the economy. Big government spending programs to build munitions, ships, plans, and other war stuff improve the economy. Or, we could skip the war and just have big government spending programs building infrastructure, schools, and other stuff. Dean Baker writes,

Sorry Mr. Broder, outside of Fox on 15th the world does not work this way. War affects the economy the same way that other government spending affects the economy. It does not have some mystical impact as Broder seems to think.

If spending on war can provide jobs and lift the economy then so can spending on roads, weatherizing homes, or educating our kids. Yes, that’s right, all the forms of stimulus spending that Broder derided so much because they add to the deficit will increase GDP and generate jobs just like the war that Broder is advocating (which will also add to the deficit).

So, we have two routes to prosperity. We can either build up our phsyical infrastructure and improve the skills and education of our workers or we can go kill Iranians. Broder has made it clear where he stands.

Paul Krugman provides a brief snark. Writing for Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt writes, “I haven’t read such an ill informed and morally bankrupt piece of “analysis” in quite some time (which is saying something).” Blake Hounshell asks, “Has David Broder lost his mind?” And Marc Lynch provides an analysis that argues “Broder’s column is an interesting study in how really dumb ideas bounce around Washington D.C.”

I’ve long thought Broder was overrated as a columnist, but in light of his reputation and stature, I think the Washington Post would be doing him a great kindness to insist he retire soon. Like last week.

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In other media news, Andrew Breitbart has struck again with another contrived “caught on tape” accusation. This one is on behalf of Lost Cause Joe Miller, who is about to be defeated in the Alaska senatorial race by either the Democrat or a write-in Republican.

Breitbart claims reporters from an Alaska CBS affiliate somehow accidentally left a message in Joe Miller’s voicemail in which they are plotting against the Miller campaign. Yeah, right. Like anyone needs to plot against the Miller campaign at this point.

The Stewart/Colbert rally looked like a great party. I caught a bit of it on streaming video today. As Alex Pareene says, liberals at heart really do long for reason and civility; righties at heart are all about anger and resentment.

Speaking of which, last week there was an article posted at the Esquire website by Paul Junot that I’ve been meaning to link to. He argues that wingnut politics really are identity politics, but it’s an identity politics that has to deny it’s identity politics, because those who identity with the “identity” in question see themselves as the default cultural norm, therefore they can’t be an “identity.” Basically, teabaggers/righties are “a
privileged majority that perceives itself as an underprivileged minority,” also known as “Sore Winners.”

The Sore Winners are people consumed by the idea that other people (we’ll call them “liberals”) look down on them, and this is the chief canker in their souls.

It is one of the biggest dividing lines between liberals and conservatives: sensitivity. Liberals are supposed to be the sensitive ones, but even the liberals who worked themselves into a froth over George W. Bush never really cared very much about what he thought of them. But conservatives care what President Obama thinks. They care to the point of imagining what he thinks. I get the same feeling listening to them that I’ve gotten living in the South and listening to Southerners tell me about Yankees and the War of Northern Aggression. Well, although I’ve lived in the South nearly 30 years I’m a Yankee born and raised, and I can tell you with reasonable authority that no one in North thinks or talks about the Civil War. Nor do they talk about SEC football. Nor do they worry about what Southerners think of them, whereas I’ve heard many Southerners explain the football prowess of SEC schools in terms of self-esteem — i.e., that success on the football field is what allows Southerners to feel they’re “just as good” as everyone else, even though everyone else is blessedly unaware of the outcome of the Iron Bowl, or even where it’s played.

Worrying about what someone who doesn’t think about you thinks about you: this is the essence of Sore Winnerdom, and it is no accident that it also the essence of the Republican animus. The Republican party was small and hidebound — the party of country-club corporatists, and the range-war West — until, with the Reagan Revolution, it began grafting unto itself the legions of the disaffected: the Christianists, the Southerners, the blue-collar workers displaced by the collapse of America’s industrial base and estranged from the unions that failed them. The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is part of an ongoing migration of the perpetually petulant, a political phenomenon grounded in a demographic one: the creation of a class of baby-boom retirees who have been deprived of meaningful work but given personal computers as Christmas presents. The skin on the Republican Party’s “Big Tent” is by definition thin, and under it gathers a volatile throng of people with nothing in common but the fear that outside its environs someone is laughing at them — or simply having a better time.

Yes, righties, we are having a much better time. And we don’t care what you think about that. Deal with it.

I really do think Junod is on to something here, and I’ve said so in the past. Like, in 2005 —

It’s important to understand that righties are always on defense. Even when they attack, attack, attack, it’s defense. Even when they are in the majority (not their current status), it’s defense. Righties are fueled by a subconscious inferiority complex and a deep-seated resentment of everyone and everything they subconsciously feel inferior to. People who disagree with them and their worldview are not just a threat to their ideology but to their fragile self-identity. They must attack.

In their minds, their crazy aggressiveness is justified because are defending themselves from some awful thing that Everyone Else is doing to them. But it’s all phantoms. They are crazily attacking phantoms, while the real evil is completely off their radar.

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Also, thanks to everyone for your great support during the Miss Lucy Memorial fund drive. I definitely will be able to pay for Lucy’s crematory costs and bring her ashes home next week, and pay off some other bills as well.

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Update: Take that, Glenn Beck:

Expert company hired by CBS to do aerial count of turnout at Glenn Beck’s rally in August–they came up with 87,000, give or take a few–just announced its findings for the Stewart/Colbert demo. The number: 215,000, or 2 1/2 times the Beck turnout.

It’s been about a year since I’ve done any fund-raising, and I’m in a hole because of Miss Lucy’s vet and crematory costs, so I’m banging the tin cup again. Right now I can’t even spring Lucy’s ashes from the mortuary, never mind catch up on the bills that didn’t get paid because I had to get her veterinary care. I would be most grateful for whatever you can spare.

And if all you can spare is $1, I’d be grateful for that. If everyone who drops by here every day chipped in just $1, it would make a real difference to me.

And if not for me, give so I can bring Lucy home.

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In the news of the weird department, Bob Barr has endorsed Russ Feingold. Believe it, or not.

I’m hearing that the PayPal button in the previous post is not working for some people. I’m frantically looking for an alternative way to receive online donations, but haven’t found one. PayPal has pretty much cornered that market, I believe. However, a donation does come through occasionally, which makes me think either the problem was temporary or might be fixed by trying a different browser, or something. If you’re still having trouble, please add to the comments to this post and I will complain to PayPal.

Also, if you try to use the donation button and somehow cannot, please describe what happened so I can explain this to the PayPal techies.

RedState has a video of what Lauren Valle was doing before the assault, which RedState seems to think justifies a bunch of thugs assaulting her. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Here it is:

About 17 seconds into the video, you can make out Valle, in a red hoodie and blond wig, approaching Rand’s car and holding up her sign in front of the car window. By 19 seconds into the video, you can see that some guys had surrounded her and gotten her away from the car. Then, in the video, that sequence is enlarged and repeated twice, so that after we’ve watched it the third time Valle has been pulled away from the car by the 32 second mark. Another 20 seconds or so goes by before we see Paul getting out of the car.

If you stop the video at exactly 55 seconds, you can see that Paul is just getting out of his car, and there’s a blond woman in a red top, carrying a cardboard sign, standing in front of the car. She’s several feet away. I believe Valle’s story is that some guys chased her around the front of the car and then assaulted her. I can’t tell if she is being chased around the front of the car, but I believe that is her, and she is definitely in front of the car. I’ll try to get a screen capture to show it better.

[Update: I watched it again, and if you keep your eyes at the top of the screen from about 50 seconds on, you clearly see Valle running in front of the car, and she doesn’t seem to be running toward Rand Paul. And you can make out what appears to be Pezzano, with his “don’t tread on me” button, chasing her.]

This video follows Paul and doesn’t show the assault, but we know from watching other videos that the assault begins about the time Paul had completely emerged from the car, which was just a second or two after what we see at the 55 second mark.

If anything, this video shows us that the assault had nothing to do with protecting Rand Paul. The goons assaulted her because they knew she was there to somehow ridicule their candidate, and they were angry.

In the earlier sequence, the one repeated three times, it appears the men who moved her away from the car used only enough force to do so. Basically, it appears some guy in a suit got between her and the car and shoved her away. I don’t have an issue with that.

However, this video corroborates that Valle was several feet away from Rand Paul when the assault began. So even if she were making another attempt to approach Rand Paul — the video doesn’t show her at this point — she was still some distance away from him, and Profitt and Pezzano could have just gotten between her and Paul and blocked her. Manhandling her to the ground and stepping on her clearly was uncalled for.

Update: I can’t believe I’m spending time on this, but I think it needs to be done, somehow — he’s another video showing Paul getting out of the car, and then the camera swings over to show the assault.

Now, I’ve looked at the “Paul getting out of the car” sequence in the first video above (which begins with someone opening the car door for Paul at about the 48 second mark), and compared it to the “Paul getting out of the car” sequence at the beginning of this second video. They are from different angles, and our view of Paul is blocked for a time in the second video. But the assault on Vale is going on while Paul is completely out of the car and walking away from the car, so that would have been just after we see someone who seems to be Valle standing in front of the car.

Here’s the screen capture:

So it appears that, one way or another, she was jumped and assaulted while she was several feet away from Rand Paul, probably less than five seconds after we see what seems to be her standing in front of the car.

Take a look and tell me what you think.

Update: See also No More Mr. Nice Blog.

Updates — The other man in the Kentucky stomping episode told Kentucky CBS affiliate WKYT that he didn’t approve of the stomp. “Another man involved in the altercation, Mike Pezzano, who held down Ms. Valle, tells NEWSFIRST he doesn’t condone Profitt’s actions.”

Profitt has another excuse — he had to stomp Lauren Valle because he has a bad back and can’t bend over. So what would he have done if he could have bent over? Punch her instead? She was already on the ground and being held down by Pezzano, and not resisting, so exactly what did he think still needed to be done?

Get this: “And when asked if he would apologize to Valle. ‘I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you,’ Profitt said.”

Also according to WKYT, “Lauren Valle has been released from the hospital and is recovering from injuries including a concussion and a sprained shoulder and arm.”

At Hateway Jim’s site, a commenter who claims he was there has an eyewitness account that sounds plausible to me.

I was at the rally from the start with my 19 year son. … We were only a few feet & got a good view of the events that happened. We saw everything that happened. I have to say this but the headline & story posted here is not correct & to be honest is… not telling the truth. … I’m sorry but she did not go after Mr Paul, she was in front closest to the curb where Mr Paul’s suv would park. She was pushed towards the back by two large men. A few people noticed that. I guess because some people called her a hippie & an agent. But we didn’t notice that or cared, one older lady said “Hey young man that’s not how you treat a young woman” Paul’s suv pulled up she then started to walk around to suv like others were doing for a better view. At that point someone yelled out “She’s going after Paul!” Another women assumed they meant her and she moved away. The same two men moved towards the young lady, at that point another woman yelled: “Leave her alone!”, that’s when she ran & looked very scared. My son was about to moved towards one of the men & that’s when the camera’s pick up the action. I grabbed him just in time we were right behind the camera man. After the event a good amount of people wanted the police to arrest both men & a few other people.

With the caveat that there’s no way to know if the guy was really there or not — It’s worth going to the link to read the whole comment (it’s #102). He is stunned at how the incident is being reported on Faux News and sounds like a disillusioned man. Not that the rest of the Hateway crowd cared; they are still convinced that Valle just got what was coming to her.

The Right is trying to paint Valle as a dangerous radical who has been arrested for her actions in the past. According to media reports, her most notorious prior acts were “defacing” a drilling boat after the Deepwater Horizon spill and unfurling a “Free Tibet” banner in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics. She doesn’t have a history of violent activism, in other words.

In the drilling boat incident, she and some others working for Greenpeace painted anti-Actic drilling messages addressed to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on some boat. Hardly a violent act, but the boat was private property so the group was afoul of the law.

And as for the Free Tibet sign — you go girl.

Valle says she never got a chance to get close to Paul because the Paul crew blocked her even as the candidate got out of his car. She believes they had identified her as a Moveon.org worker and “targeted” her. From what I’ve seen of the videos it does appear the Paul guys already had her surrounded and were manhandling her even as Paul got out of the car.

Updates — there was some question about whether Valle was groped as she was being shoved around. From these photographs, it appears possible.

See also Scott Lemieux’s review of wingnut excuses for the stomp.

As some of you already know, the person identified as the alleged stomper of Lauren Valle’s head is a volunteer for Rand Paul’s Senate campaign named Tim Profitt. The Associated Press reports that Profitt has been dropped as Paul’s Bourbon County campaign coordinator and banned from future events. Profitt will be summoned to court, where a judge will decide if he will face assault charges.

Also from the AP, to be filed under Profiles in Weenieness:

The volunteer with Rand Paul’s Republican U.S. Senate campaign who stepped on the head of a liberal activist and pinned her face to the concrete said Tuesday the scuffle was not as bad as it looked on video and blamed police for not intervening.

Profitt says someone saw Valle standing there with her sign and tried to get the police to contain her. The police said that wasn’t their job, possibly because as yet there are no laws against being a Known Liberal Carrying a Cardboard Sign.

There’s a more complete video of the incident at TPM now. I’ve watched the fool video several times, and it doesn’t appear that Valle got anywhere near Paul.

This is significant, because the official version of the incident emerging at Hateway Pundit’s blog is that Valle assaulted Paul — I’m serious — and therefore got what she deserved.

Really, Hateway Jim and his minions are now completely untethered from all sanity, not to mention decency. In Hateway’s world, being a paid liberal activist means forfeiting all legal rights to life, liberty, etc. One commenter actually was dismayed that Paul distanced himself from Profitt instead of thanking him.

Seriously, it’s obvious that it doesn’t occur to these, um, persons that people who disagree with them are people, too. Very sick.

Outside the Conway-Paul debate in Lexington last night a pack of Paul supporters surrounded a woman representing Moveon.org and, it appears, knocked her to the ground. Then one man held her down on the curb while another, who appears to be wearing a “don’t tread on me” hat, trod on her head and shoulders. TPM has the video.

The woman, Lauren Valle, was able to speak to reporters after the incident, but the thug easily could have broken her neck. She was very lucky to not be seriously harmed.

The Blue Bluegrass Blog has multiple photos of the guy holding Valle to the ground. He was wearing a “don’t tread on me” button.

In he video you can hear people say “call the police.” It’s not clear to me if they wanted to help Valle or have her arested. News stories say that the cops questioned her after the incident. Open season on liberals in Kentucky? Valle has filed an assault complaint, but as of the latest news stories no arrests have been made.

The Other McCain makes jokes and complains that righties get stepped on, too. I’m beginning to think conservatism may result from some kind of hormonal imbalance that keeps people in perpetual adolescence.

Let this also serve as a reminder that when teabaggers talk about “liberty,” they are really talking about license — to eliminate everyone they don’t like.

Update: Yes! All my expectations have come to pass — Jim “Hateway Pundit” (typo, but I’m leaving it in) Hoft writes:

Unhinged MoveOn.org Activist Tackled and Stepped On at Rand Paul Rally (Video)
Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, October 26, 2010, 4:46 AM

Another day… Another unhinged leftist stalks and lunges at a Republican leader.

MoveOn.org contract employee Lauren Valle wasn’t counting on this reaction by Rand Paul supporters.

[photo of Valle being stepped on]

She was tackled and stepped on by Paul supporters. (TPM)

Look for the state-run media to make her into some kind of saint by the end of the day.
Here’s the video:

A MoveOn.org activist had her head stepped on after she tried to harass Rand Paul prior to his final debate on Monday. … Let’s hope Code Pink was watching.

The video shows what happened prior to the other video — the very petite Ms. Valle being manhandled, literally, and shoved to the ground. Notice at the end someone gestures to the guy doing the stomping and persuades him to stop. He could easily have snapped Valle’s neck. And Hoft thinks this was a good thing. Unbelievable.

And get the comments:

Aside from a foot being placed on her head, I see no other way to tell these crazies that they aren’t wanted. They aren’t reasonable so they cannot be handled reasonably. This picture is exactly what the media is out for. It was probably necessary, but very unfortunate. George Soros probably wee-wee’d in his Depends when he got this.

It is on the news but the left out the first part, that she was attacking Paul. They are making her sound like Lady Fauntleroy.

It is about time that people starting putting the hate-America first left to the ground where they belong. These scumbags have done everything they can to destroy this nation and cover for their fellow debris in office. They all need to be put to the floor and made to stay there.

Has someone told the Catholic Church that a rabid hate site (First Things is a Catholic site) is operating in its name?

For the record, not all of the comments supported the stomping.

Righties are pointing to two items that turned up in the recent WikiLeaks military field report dump and claiming “we wuz right.” Of course, they aren’t, but there’s no point trying to explain that to them.

But just because I can’t stand to let lies go unanswered, I’ll explain anyway.

The field notes released recently estimate 109,032 Iraqi deaths over a six-year period, including about 66,000 civilian deaths. The civilian deaths detailed in the reports were mostly from roadside bombs or sectarian violence. This caused some Aussie to note:

I’m not sure it’s what WikiLeaks intended, but its latest leaks reveal that the infamous Lancet paper which claimed the US-led liberation of Iraq cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis in fact exaggerated the death toll by at least 600 per cent.

Of course, the Lancet study and the field notes are apples and oranges. The Lancet study was not trying to measure the number of people killed by wartime violence. It was a study of the changes in mortality rates FROM ALL CAUSES before and after the U.S. coalition invasion. ALL CAUSES included deaths from sickness, from falling off ladders while changing light bulbs, from heart attacks, from getting drunk and drowning in a bathtub, whatever.

The Lancet people took large samples and determined that the mortality rate in Iraq, expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year, had gone up from 5.5 before the invasion to 13.3 after the invasion. This was their principal finding. Again, this is ALL DEATHS, not just deaths that happened during some military action.

The point of this was not to determine how many people were being killed directly by guns and bombs, but as one way to measure quality of life before and after the invasion. And this is important, because the real impact of war is not just the direct impact of guns and bombs. It is the impact of scarcity of clean water, or baby formula, or antibiotics. It’s also the impact of the abundance of stress.

A person who died in his home of a treatable illness because the local hospital was bombed and the doctors ran away is just as much a casualty of war as the hospital personnel who died in the bombing. But the military field report would not have counted such a death; the Lancet study did.

Now, it’s possible the Lancet study was inaccurate. I’m not in a position to judge. I’m just trying to set the record straight on what the Lancet study actually, well, studied. It didn’t say what most people say it said.

Again, it was the change in the mortality rate that was significant, not an absolute number of deaths. However, some people got out their calculators and came up with a number of Iraqi deaths in the range of 650,000, a number which, for reasons explained in an old post, should not have been the focus of attention.

And that number got in the headlines, and the Right reacted with scorn and derision and declared the Lancet study bogus, because they couldn’t believe that 650,000 Iraqis had been killed by guns and bombs. And they hadn’t, and the Lancet study never said such a thing, but because righties don’t read, or think, they never bothered to understand what the Lancet study actually said. And they still don’t understand what it said.

Fred Kaplan gets it wrong also, strongly implying that the Lancet study claimed 650,000 deaths mostly from U.S. air and artillery strikes. Naughty, Fred Kaplan.

Righties are also claiming the field notes say that vast quantities of WMDs were found that we weren’t told about. However, if you actually read the article they’re all linking too — again, the reading thing always trips them up — what was actually found appears to have been mostly old and degraded mustard gas and similar stuff left over from before the Gulf War, in “relatively small stockpiles.”

Wingnuts: This is not news. Get a grip.

At one point, the article says, some troops found some old mustard gas that was still potent enough to raise a few blisters if applied to the skin. Wow. And for this we invaded Iraq.

Stuff to read: The Washington Post tried to figure out how many tea party followers there really are and what they really think. The first thing they learned is that of 1,400 or so local tea party groups that are claimed to exist, fewer than 650 could be verified. Even with the help of the parent organizations, independent research, and multiple phone calls, a majority of the groups listed on the tea party websites appear to be made of phantoms.

The groups that were found were sent questionnaires, most of which were filled out and returned. The results showed us, once again, that the Tea Party is a movement without a cause:

Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general. …

…The most common responses were concerns about spending and limiting the size of government, but together those were named by less than half the groups. Social issues, such as same-sex marriage and abortion rights, did not register as concerns.

I got a kick out of this:

One question remains: If most tea party groups don’t engage in political campaigning, what exactly do they do?

Lisante, from Miami County, Ohio, said his meetings generally start with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a prayer, and then a speaker and a skit – the most recent was about the bank bailout. (Lisante said it was very funny.) The point, he said, is not to organize political action but to educate members and encourage them to become active on their own.

I can’t be too hard on this group, because at least they give a damn. It’s just a shame they’re never exposed to anything but right-wing propaganda.

Finally, don’t miss Ari Berman’s “Boot the Blue Dogs.”

In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about the WikiLeaks document dump, the New York Times describes how the independent contractors hired to prop up the military effort actually fouled things up —

The archive, which describes many episodes never made public in such detail, shows the multitude of shortcomings with this new system: how a failure to coordinate among contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy.

Contractors often shot with little discrimination — and few if any consequences — at unarmed Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security forces, American troops and even other contractors, stirring public outrage and undermining much of what the coalition forces were sent to accomplish.

Be sure to read the whole thing. One point the article does not make is that these “contractors” were paid a great deal more for doing things soldiers used to do, which is one reason the bleeping war cost so much.