Wish I had seen your post before I submitted my own - would have saved me the typing and Pat made the point more effectively.

On this one the POTUS may have a point:

1) In 1953 we, along with the UK, aided the overthrow of the democratically elected (though nationalistic) government of Mohammed Mosaddeq and replaced it with governance by the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

2) Over the coming decades, the Shah eliminated his moderate opposition. By the early-mid 1970s, the only faction left to oppose him was the clerics.

3) 1979 - the Shah was overthrown, Iran was weakened, to the point where the Soviets felt comfortable invading Afghanistan. Iran no longer existed as a regional power capable of acting as a check on Soviet ambitions.

Yes, we do have a history of meddling in Iran's affairs - to our own detriment.

Back in the late 1980s, Jonathan Kwitny (at that time a WSJ foreign affairs correspondent who later moved to PBS) wrote a book titled Endless Enemies. Learned a lot from it when I read it way back when.

Dear Venus58 - I agree strongly that personal responsibility should be a condition of receiving governmental assistance - for the good of the recipients and their families. Welfare to Work shoudn't have been rolled back. Perhaps, given the state of the economy, a better alternative might have been to tack a workfare provision that would provide some sort of make-work employment in the event that recipients were unable to obtain regular private sector employment.

However, I'm not at all ready to conclude that the President's goal is to turn us into a nation of dependents.

Hey Rider, thanks for your thoughtful comments. You're right - when push comes to shove each of us must create our own prosperity. The biggest concern I have is that this seems so much harder for many of us to do now than, say, 40 or so years ago, when there existed an abundance of well-paying manufacturing jobs (perhaps the ultimate "safety net").

In today's economy, if you're not a technologist, tradesman, or professional, chances are you're in pretty rough shape . If you're working 12 hours a day @ 12/hr to make ends meet and support a family (rough, but better than many of the alternatives), it's quite likely that you'll have neither the time nor the money to pursue additional education or training that would lead to better employment and a higher standard of living. In short, you're stuck and your prospects for a better future for yourself and your family are, well, less than promising. This is where I feel government could play a positive role in fostering opportunity by promoting continuing education, training, etc (through grants or low interest loans). This, of course, begs the question...training to do what? God, I wish we still had a robust manufacturing sector :)

To the harshest critics of the current Adminstration and Congressional majority: do any of you know or care what the consequences would be for the most vulnerable among us if Medicare and Social Security were eliminated? If schooling were available to only those children whose parents could afford to pay tuition? If unemployment insurance were rescinded? If food stamps were abolished? Do you really believe that already stretched to the limit family, friends, neighbors, and charity have the wherewithal to fill the vaccum that would be left by an abolition of all governmental assistance programs?

My personal view is that there is absolutely a positive role for government (federal/state/local) to play in terms of fostering opportunity, facilitating upward mobility, and even enabling those who are in dire economic straits to live to fight another day, not by fostering dependency, but by promoting opportunity (training/education in conjuction with workfare, for example).

I can't help but wonder whether the preferred solution of some of the commentators on this article to the problem of downward mobility and poverty would be a mass die-off to reduce the "surplus population".

As my handle indicates, I'm braced for the inevitable blowback.