Rand Paul's injuries much worse than reported earlier

At The Daily Caller Chris White reports that Senator Rand Paul’s

injuries were far worse than initially reported. He has lung contusions, or bruises, caused by the broken ribs, Doug Stafford, Paul’s chief of staff, said in a statement Sunday. The type of fractures the senator sustained can cause other significant medical problems, including internal bleeding and pneumonia.

“This type of injury is caused by high-velocity severe force. It is not clear exactly how soon he will return to work, as the pain is considerable as is the difficulty in getting around, including flying,” Stafford said.

Fox News reports,

…The Bowling Green Daily News reported that an arrest warrant said Paul told police his neighbor came on his property and tackled him from behind Friday, forcing him to the ground, all while the senator had been mowing his lawn. He had trouble breathing because of the rib injury, the warrant said.

“Displaced rib fractures can lead to life-threatening injuries such as hemopneumothorax, pneumothorax, pneumonia, internal bleeding, laceration of internal organs and lung contusions. Senator Paul does have lung contusions currently,” Stafford explained.

Aaron Blake at the Washington Post is frustrated because the motive is unclear.

But for my money, it is Mark Steyn who hits the nail on the head on the subject of “motive.”

A republic requires virtue, and the decline of virtue is accompanied necessarily by the decline of the concept of evil, and its substitution by exculpatory analysis of the “motives” of evil. A more useful conversation would be on what it takes to remove the most basic societal inhibition – including the instinctive revulsion that would prevent most of us from taking the lives of strangers, including in this case eighteen-month-old babies. That inhibition is weaker in the dar al-Islam, because of Islam’s institutional contempt for “the other” (unbelievers) but also because of the rewards promised in the afterlife. Thus, violence is sanctioned by paradise. That is the precise inversion of our society, and yet the weakening of inhibition seems to be proceeding here, too. A church sealed off by yellow police tape: a shameful and astonishing sight, and yet one senses that it will neither shame nor astonish us for long, that something else will come along to make the records books and distract a couple of news cycles.

Was the attacker a Leftist? Yes, all sources mention that.