At tonight's CNN GOP debate, John King asked a bogus immigration question (no surprise), and Ron Paul answered in a way that was even more confused than usual. I'm not even going to bother discussing Paul's comments since it doesn't really matter.

What does matter is a source that presents themselves as the home of real journalism asking a question like this (transcript link):

And so, Dr. Paul, to you on this one, the question comes up, though, once they’re in the country illegally, you have - compassion sometimes bumps up against enforcing the law and state budget crises. A 5-year-old child of an illegal immigrant walks into an emergency room. Does the child get care?

1. There's a good chance that the child of an illegal alien is a U.S. citizen, and no one outside the furthest fringe is suggesting stripping U.S. citizens of any rights to which they're entitled.

2. As with the preceding, very few people want to deny emergency services to illegal aliens.

So, King is basically describing situations that don't really exist in the real world.

Paul's answer follows; figuring it out is left as an exercise:

Well, first off, we shouldn’t have the mandates. We bankrupted the hospitals and the schools in Texas and other states. We shouldn’t give them easy citizenship.

We should think about protecting our borders, rather than the borders between Iraq and Afghanistan. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

(APPLAUSE)

But on — on coming in, you know, there was a time when government wasn’t — we didn’t depend on government for everything. There was a time when the Catholic Church actually looked after…

KING: But should they get care? Should they get care? Should taxpayers have to pay for that care?

PAUL: No, they should not be forced to, but we wouldn’t — we shouldn’t be penalizing the Catholic Church, because they’re trying to fulfill a role. And some of the anti-immigrants want to come down hard on the Catholic Church, and that is wrong.

If we believed in our free society — as a matter of fact, this whole immigration problem is related to the economy. People aren’t coming over as much now because it’s weak. When we had a healthy economy, some of our people didn’t work (ph) and people flowed over here getting jobs. So there is an economic issue here, as well.

But, no, if you have an understanding and — and you want to believe in freedom, freedom has solved these kind of problems before. You don’t have to say, oh, you’re not going to have care or there won’t be any care and everybody is going to starve to death and — and die on the streets without medical care. That’s the implication of the question. That’s just not true, and you shouldn’t accept it.