So much for being the champion of the people, Rand.

If Paul isn't running for president, I'll eat my hat. Check out his letter to Harry Reid, where he has now officially wet his bed.

Sen. Rand Paul today issued a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urging him to incorporate various national security concerns into the comprehensive immigration reform debate in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. Sen. Paul believes that comprehensive immigration reform requires a strong national security and until we can fully understand the systematic failures that enabled two individuals to immigrate to the United States from an area known for being hotbed of Islamic extremism, we should not proceed.

Paul sounds like a typical right wing xenophobe ala Peter King in his letter to Reid, which is chock full of fearmongering about our safety from "others" trying to get into America.

We should not proceed until we understand the specific failures of our immigration system. Why did the current system allow two individuals to immigrate to the United States from the Chechen Republic in Russia, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, who then committed acts of terrorism? Were there any safeguards? Could this have been prevented? Does the immigration reform before us address this?

There should be hearings in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that study the national security aspects of this situation, making sure that our current immigration system gives individuals from high-risk areas of the world heightened scrutiny

How is any form of immigration law going to tell us if a nine-year-old boy will become radicalized after living here for ten years?

I respectfully request that the Senate consider the following two conditions as part of the comprehensive immigration reform debate:

One, the Senate needs a thorough examination of the facts in Massachusetts to see if legislation is necessary to prevent a similar situation in the future. Two, national security protections must be rolled into comprehensive immigration reform to make sure the federal government does everything it can to prevent immigrants with malicious intent from using our immigration system to gain entry into the United States in order to commit future acts of terror.

He's some civil libertarian, isn't he?

Digby writes:

This is what "liberty" looks like to the poster boy for libertarian freedom. Funny, it looks very much like a standard-issue right-wing, pants-wetting panic artist to me. They all seem to believe that we will be so much freer if only we allow the authorities more "freedom" to decide who does and doesn't hate us for our "freedom" and make sure they don't get into our "free" country. Because that's totally doable.

Michael Tomasky writes that being afraid and paranoid is part of the conservative mindset, just like blood sucking vampires:

As usual, conservatives are rushing to judgment, shredding the Constitution, using the bombing as an pretext for derailing immigration reform, and generally seeking any excuse to reimpose their paranoid and authoritarian worldview, which needs fear like a vampire needs blood, on the rest of us.
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The common thread through all of this is the conservative need to instill and maintain a level of fear in the populace. They need to make gun owners fear that Dianne Feinstein and her SWAT team are going to come knocking on their doors, or, less amusingly, that they have to be armed to the teeth for that inevitable day when the government declares a police state. They need to whip up fear of immigrants, because unless we do, it’s going to be nothing but terrorists coming through those portals, and for good measure, because, as Ann Coulter and others have recently said, the proposed law would create millions of voting Democrats (gee, I wonder why!).

And with regard to terrorism, they need people to live in fear of the next attack, because fear makes people think about death, and thinking about death makes people more likely to endorse tough-guy law-and-order, Constitution-shredding actions undertaken on their behalf. This is how we lived under Bush and Cheney for years. This fear is basically what enabled the Iraq War to take place. Public opinion didn’t support that war at first. But once they got the public afraid with all that false talk of mushroom clouds, the needle zoomed past 50 percent, and it was bombs away.

Conservatism, I fear (so to speak), can never be cleansed of this need to instill fear. Whether it’s of black people or of street thugs or of immigrants or of terrorists or of jackbooted government agents, it’s how the conservative mind works. I don’t even think it’s always cynical and manipulative; conservatives often do see enemies under every bed. But that doesn’t mean they’re there, and it most definitely doesn’t mean the rest of us ought to make law and policy based on their nightmares.