This image was posted on Google+ last night by Forever Palestine. I have no context for it. I assume it is a father kissing his dead daughter before he buries her. It is a heartbreaking image.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m highly sympathetic toward the Palestinians. But I don’t particularly take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is a mess. I think lowly of the belligerents on both sides. But it is the Palestinians who are dying in such large numbers. And I don’t think that takes away from what Israeli civilians are going through. The random rocket fire does create terror, and for the people harmed or killed, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are.

But this image reminds me of Benjamin Netanyahu’s comment on CNN that Hamas “use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.” Undoubtedly, the corpses do have a PR value. But the statement is entirely typical of war propaganda: dehumanize the enemy. I think you can say that Hamas’ actions are shortsighted. (You can say the same thing about Israel’s actions.) But you can’t say that Hamas doesn’t love its children.

Another problem is that Americans tend to make assumptions about Hamas that are not valid. While the group does use terrorism as a tactic, the group is a lot more than that. Treating the group as a monolith is a mistake. Another false assumption is to equate Hamas with the people of Gaza. And blanket statements like Netanyahu’s only reinforce these false assumptions, which is probably why they are made.

Would it be so hard for us all to agree that all the peoples of the world value life? Or at least that we all love our children? This seems the very least we can do. But the dehumanization of the enemy is very important in allowing the killing to continue. And I don’t expect either side to acknowledge the humanity of the other any time soon. Meanwhile, the anguished man in the photograph is real. The child is dead. And regardless of PR or ideology or property right, this is wrong.

I’ve avoided talking too much about the murder of Michael Brown, because there really isn’t much to say. It is very much like school shootings: these are avoidable tragedies, but the power elite aren’t interested in doing anything about them. I did write an article about it last week, Michael Brown Murder Uncovers Deeply Flawed Local Policing. In that article, I compared Michael Brown to Andy Lopez, a young man in my home town who was killed by an officer who mistook his toy gun for a real one.

In the article, I noted that the officer shot Lopez seven times in six seconds. When the shooting was investigated, the authorities found that the officer acted appropriately. But here’s the key, “And if you check the internet about the killing, most of what you will see is that Lopez was high on cannabis, as though that has anything to do with the situation.”

So I was not surprised when I read in the Washington Post, County Investigation: Michael Brown Was Shot From the Front, Had Marijuana in His System. This has no obvious relevance to the shooting. Just like the release of video from a convenience store robbery, it is being used to tarnish Brown’s reputation—to throw doubt into the public discussion.

Note how callous this is. The unstated message is that Michael Brown was a bad kid (or might have been) and therefore it was justified to kill him. And for a large swath of America, their only real experience with cannabis is government propaganda that is one step up from Reefer Madness. For them, someone under the influence of the drug could have done anything. It’s like all those old scare stories about PCP. So suddenly Michael Brown was some wild man who could have broken out of handcuffs.

To make matters worse, the man who did the autopsy for Brown’s parents, Michael Baden was on Fox News speculating about the toxicology report that he hadn’t seen. The whole thing is very much the way that Fox News wants to push this. Greta Van Susteren asked, “Does the fact that they found marijuana, does that exclude the fact that there might be other drugs in his system or even that the marijuana was laced with anything?” We don’t even know that the cannabis levels indicate that he was high. It is possible that the drugs are from days or even weeks before.

This is all so predictable. It’s like they teach this in police training, “After you needlessly kill a young man, do everything you can to vilify him, even if you have to make stuff up. Then wait a few months, release a report that exonerates the officer. And hold a press conference about starting a dialog and the need for healing.” It is sickening in its premeditation. It is boring in its familiarity.

Over the weekend, Martin Longman (AKA: the handcuffed frog blogger) made an interesting observation, Why Presidential Horserace Pieces are Boring. I think what he really meant is that horse race pieces are stupid. And his reasoning is interesting: regardless of who the Republicans nominate, they will lose. I don’t agree with that logic. I’m a fundamentals kind of guy, and I think that as bad a candidate as Newt Gingrich could be elected president in 2016 if the economy crumbles in the months leading up to the election.

But I’m in agreement with Longman: I’m not very interested in presidential horse race articles. And that’s why I’m going to write one. Because I think I know who the Republicans are going to nominate for president in 2016: Rand Paul. But don’t worry, I haven’t lost all sense. I certainly don’t think that he will get the nomination because the Republicans have turned libertarian. Instead, he will get the nomination because he claims to be a libertarian without actually acting like it.

A big part of this is the fascination that Republicans have for the libertarian brand. And everyone knows that Rand Paul is a libertarian—whatever that might mean. When I was a libertarian, I hated what I saw as pretenders like Rand Paul. As it was, I didn’t vote for his father when he ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, and his father is a hell of a lot closer to an actual libertarian than Rand is. His reputation is based on his isolationist foreign policy ideas, lukewarm support of LGBT rights, and his kinda sorta support of cannabis legalization.

The problem for Rand Paul is that the things that make him the new poster boy of libertarianism are things that the base of the Republican Party hates. But this is a minor problem for Paul. As each day goes by, we find him pushing himself further and further away from any libertarian positions into a nice comfortable conservative place. So by this time next year, he will have massaged every position so that it still sounds libertarian, while still being full of conservative red meat for the base.

For the Republican voter, Rand Paul will be the ultimate candidate. He will have the official George Washington seal of approval without having to take on any of the actual ideas of the first president or any of the other founders of the nation. This is what the Tea Party is all about and they will vote for Rand Paul as long as he doesn’t keep saying things that upset their sense of American exceptionalism. It will be perfect: conservative elitism in the clothes of libertarian idealism.

A lot of people seem to think that Paul will have problems with things he’s said in the past. But as we’ve seen over and over, Paul has no problem just ignoring the past or claiming that he misspoke in the past. All politicians try to do that, of course. But the Republican base seems awfully forgiving about this. Just look at the transformation that Mitt Romney went through. The problem with Rand Paul’s father was always that he was too wedded to his ideology. The son learned not to do that from his father’s failure to inspire the Republican Party. So Rand Paul very clearly doesn’t believe in anything other than that he ought to be president. And I think that will see him through to the nomination.

Let us hope to God that he doesn’t win the general election.

Jonathan Chait wrote an article today with a really interesting title, No, the Founders Were Not Tea Partiers. And then he went on to write a totally different article. What he’s actually writing about is how the anti-democratic structure of the Senate was not something that the framers wanted; it was something that they had to accept to pacify the smaller states who thought that the big states would walk all over them. As Alexander Hamilton said in the debate over the new Constitution, “But as States are a collection of individual men which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or of the artificial beings resulting from the composition.”

In a general sense, Chait is pushing against the conservative idea that the country was meant to held in check by a small percentage of the population is little states who effectively have a veto on any legislation that they don’t like. He also makes the point that the fact that people like Hamilton and Madison were willing to compromise to get the Constitution ratified show how they aren’t like the all-or-nothing Republican base. This is all very true, but I think there is a more fundamental issue here.

People have a tendency to see people from the past in a modern context. But that makes no sense at all. The Magna Carta is bizarre to the modern reader. Pointing out that the king is not above the law when it come to feudal lords seems self-evident. But in 1215, it was the most liberal of documents. Similarly, in the minds of modern conservatives, the founding fathers are sealed in Amber. It is only in this way that they can claim Hamilton and Madison as their own.

But the historical context of our country’s founding was the effort to expand equality. These men where thus liberals. And by that I don’t mean “classical liberals” in the sense that libertarians like to use it. Most of them were that, but it gives the wrong impression. The important point is that “classical liberalism” was a reaction against hereditary rule. And that makes it liberal as we think of it today.

In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin argues that what makes a conservative—regardless of time—is their opposition to the expansion of equality. So conservatives were at best apologists for slavery. Conservatives were at best for stealing native lands, if not for full scale genocide. Conservatives were at best hostile to allowing women the right to vote. And the most notable things about modern conservatism are: easing the taxation of the rich, limiting reproductive freedom of women, and not allowing the LGBT community rights to marriage or even to jobs in some extreme cases.

So it is always galling to me to hear conservatives grab onto the founding fathers as though they are part of the same historical movement. When it latches onto the mantle of the country’s founding, modern conservatism is just trying to brush away over two centuries of progress. But the Constitution itself shows the lie of this. The preamble says “in order to form a more perfect union,” not “in order to form a perfect union.” Those men did not expect the country to ossify. It was conservatives then and now who want to stop the powerless from gaining more power: from George III to Ted Cruz. The founding fathers were liberals, and the state of the art in modern conservatism is 227 year old liberalism.

Tomorrow’s Paul Krugman column is a little unusual, Why We Fight Wars. It is based on some economics: namely that for advanced economies, wars are always a loser. It reminds me of my days in graduate school. We were looking carbon dioxide emissions throughout the 20th century. And we were all surprised that they went way down during World War II. But soon enough, we realized: even though there was a lot of war going on, the amount of commerce actually went way down. Bottom line: wars are bad for the economy.

Krugman’s interest is mainly in why we continue to fight wars when it isn’t in our national interests. Think about Hitler for a moment. He had a very strong economy and he could have kept the Rhineland and consolidated his power. It’s not like Poland was that great a prize. But as Krugman noted, wars are usually good for the leaders of countries:

But I think the issue is more general, and it isn’t limited to war. It is often in the best economic interests of some part of the population to harm the economy. For example, war is very good for weapons manufacturers. In his film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore presented a nice sequence about all the money to made in the aftermath of 9/11 as well as before, during, and after the Iraq War. So even though the Iraq War cost our country at least a trillion dollars, it worked out really well for some people.

Last week, Krugman’s column was on a related issue, Inequality Is a Drag. It was about the Standard & Poor’s report, How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, and Possible Ways To Change the Tide. But neither the article nor the report made the obvious point about the reason we have ever rising inequality: it is great for a small group of very powerful people: the oligarchs and those who do their bidding.

The issue that we will eventually need to deal with is the power of these oligarchs. They don’t have the interests of the country in mind. And it simply isn’t true that by distorting the political system to benefit themselves they make everyone richer. It’s even possible that their own long term interests are harmed by this behavior. This kind of short term thinking without regard to its effects has led to historically low taxes on the rich, extremely high inequality, and a crumbling middle class. But at the same time, the rich seem to think that they are excessively put upon. As I wrote the other day in StarPower: the Game That Shows We’re All Doomed, over the last three decades “we have gotten a class of [rich people] who have convinced themselves, not that the game is fair, but that it is unfair—to them.”