Recovery Strategy for Very Serious People

So, it seems that David Broder has put into words what is on the Collectively Wise Mind of the Very Serious People in DC and it has put people into a bit of a tizzy. Links below:

• Blake Hounshell (Foreign Policy) - Has David Broder lost his mind?
• Dean Baker (Center for Economic and Policy Research) - David Broder Calls for War With Iran to Boost the Economy
• Brad DeLong - There Should Be Resignations in Protest and on Principle from the Washington Post Today...
• Mark Thoma (Economist's View) - "David Broder Calls for War With Iran to Boost the Economy"
• George Washington (Via Naked Capitalism) -  Washington Post Idiocy: Calls for War With Iran to Save America's Economy
• The Shrill One -Wag The Dean

Of all of them, Krugman has the most fun (and gets to the heart of the matter most quickly) with Broder's post.  I am a bit amazed at the seriousness of the responses, especially by the economists, who try to demonstrate the idiocy and denounce the suggestion. Paul's ironic, almost laconic, reply cuts to the chase: This is a pronouncement by one of the Very Serious People, and so must be taken more seriously than the silly scribbles of shrill economists or their equivalents in other intellectual fields. This is the High Priest of Bi-Partisanship who has spoken, and Bob Somerby's Incomparable Archives give us a decade of equally gobsmackingly dumb statements that have governed the course of the nation.


David Broder knows that Washington is his place, not yours, and it is for him and the courtiers to determine the correct and serious conduct of their place's affairs. To oppose them, or merely to politely disregard them, is to be a hick. Think of it from his perspective. The current administration has mismanaged affairs, allowing dull and depressing reports to enter the airwaves and insisting on getting some minor slivers of some mildly centrist policies pushed through Congress despite the protestations against the highly partisan nature of these socialistic excesses. Now, there are commoners walking on the lawns around the monuments and waving signs and generally snarling traffic, which makes us late to the cocktails weenies at our lovely soirees. A nice war will get people's minds off things and will make our friends in the military contacting industry happy, plus everything will be set for when the right people are back in power.
 
And Broder's proposal is being taken seriously by at least some people in the White House or it wouldn't have seen the light of day. The really frightening thing about this proposal is that it makes political sense if you don't have a political agenda. If you know you can't do jack shit about the unemployment situation because you won't take a partisan stance on social and economic objectives, if you know you are being bated about being anti-American and pro-Islamist, if there are new terrorist threats reported in the newspapers right before election day, if you believe that those to the political left of you have no where else to go and that winning elections only happens by pandering to the right, then a war with Iran doesn't sound so far fetched. It's not like you really will go to war.

Unless everything is ready and there is an incident.

I read Broder's piece with a laugh and followed it with a shudder. I find it all too plausible that the Very Serious People are in greater accord on this idea than we'd like to think.

Anglachel