Ron Paul grills Bernanke: Wasn’t the Fed involved with Saddam and in Watergate?

The CPAC straw poll winner explains it all to you. This isn’t the strangest conspiracy theory he’s ever dropped on the Fed, but it’s a nice peg for David Harsanyi’s column this morning on the rEVOLution’s persistent delusion that Paul is the future of conservatism.

Let’s, for a moment, forget Paul (and how I wish this could be a permanent condition, considering the congressman is neither a serious politician nor—and I can’t stress this enough—a serious thinker)…

Paul isn’t a traditional conservative. His obsession with long-decided monetary policy and isolationism are not his only half-baked crusades. Paul’s newsletters of the ’80s and ’90s were filled with anti-Semitic and racist rants, proving his slumming in the ugliest corners of conspiracyland today is no mistake.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Paul is that thousands of intellectually curious young people will have read his silly books, including End the Fed, as serious manifestoes. Though you wouldn’t know it by listening to Paul or reading his words, libertarians do have genuine ideas that conservatives might embrace.

The line about anti-semitic and racist rants naturally prompted an angry backlash from the doctor’s cult, for which Harsanyi was well prepared. As for the clip, it’s worth watching mostly for Bernanke’s response — and for Barney Frank’s, who may be goofing on Paul in saying the committee will pursue his inquiry or may not. I’m guessing it’s the former given the uncontrollable giggling by the congressman on the left side of the screen.

Your exit quotation comes from one of Paul’s three Republican challengers (yes, really) in Texas: “Ron Paul is literally the most ineffective member of Congress… He talks about ending the IRS, ending the Fed, (restoring) the gold standard. But we’re not going back to the gold standard anytime soon. Why don’t we talk about reducing taxation, reducing legislation, cutting spending in Washington?”

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