Some Thoughts out of the Lew Rockwell Blog

This comment by Mike Tennant about Joseph Farah's column against Ron Paul for President says a lot of the things that I think.

Two things, though, that I would point out to Mr. Farah:

Paul did certainly say that we were "scapegoating" illegal immigrants. Yes, he did say that eliminating the welfare state would make it easier to allow people in. However, he, unlike many other libertarians, is smart enough to realize that until you get rid of the welfare state, you don't open your borders (many libertarians seem to think that if you can deregulate immigration first, then do so, and you'll get rid of the welfare state when all of those poor, illiterate, uneducated minorities with a chip on their shoulder against the "gringos" that they should support the free market rather than use the government to get as much money out of the wealthy whitefolk as possible.

Paul also believes that we ought to be more stingy with citizenship, which I would hazard to guess to mean that those who are not here on a permanent basis do not get to be citizens merely by being born here. This would reduce a lot of the problems associated with illegal immigration if enacted.

For myself, I also cannot help but notice that Farah does not really address the issue of the resentment that the Iranians have at us for overthrowing their democratically elected leader in 1953 and replacing him with the Shah. He indicates that he thinks the Iranian revolution could have been prevented had we not "undermined" the Shah in the 1970s, but he never really addresses the issue of whether or not we had the right to depose Mossadeq in the first place, or whether or not this produced negative effects. Farah does imply that if we had just kept imposing the Shah on Iran, everything would have been fine.

This is in keeping with previous writings, where he asserts that under the Shah there was a level of freedom in Iran (although it is not clear whether he is asserting this just in juxtaposition to the current regime or whether he is saying that putting the Shah in power and keeping him there gave them more freedom than they would have had if their democratically elected leader had been kept at the helm) and that the Iranians are nostalgic for it (no mention of whether old Iranians are nostalgic for Mossadeq).

But, c'mon, what do you expect from Osama bin Farah?

There's also a link to a sympathetic article by Brian Doherty in Reason

Also, some much-needed bad-mouthing of Establishment Man Joe Klein, and a really funny statement about why 9/11 could not have been an inside job.

That is all.