Via the Daily Caller, consider this a palate cleanser for the afternoon.  Ron Paul appeared on Morning Joe this morning and tangled a bit with Mike Barnicle on the MSNBC show over the Obama administration’s handling of Pakistan.  If you think the moment of highest irony comes at the one-minute mark when the Congressman who plays footsie with Truthers like Alex Jones talks dismissively of “conspiracy theorists,” stay tuned.  That’s just the irony warm-up:

“I see the whole thing as a mess,” he said. “And I think that we are going to be in Pakistan. I think that’s the next occupation, and I fear it. I think it’s ridiculous, and I think our foreign policy is such we don’t need to be doing this. So when I talk about doing it differently, I talk about in the context of our foreign policy and not in the fact of whether or not we should have gotten him. As a matter of fact, I voted for the first authority. I think what’s the real tragedy is that we didn’t get him 10 years ago when we could have and should have. But yet we now have spent $1 trillion. We’ve lost 5,000 people, our soldiers, in fighting two wars that had nothing to do with bin Laden. And to me, we have to reassess the foreign policy just like we have to reassess our economic policies here.”

Later in the segment, “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist asked if Paul had any information an actual invasion was in the work. Paul said he didn’t but based it on the past four decades of American foreign policy.

“No – just because I look at what has happened in the past 30 or 40 years of all the unintended consequences and what we have done and how we are spreading and how we are spreading in the attitudes that has been pervasive in our government for the past 10 years that we have this obligation to spread our goodness and protect our financial interests,” Paul said. “And right now Pakistan is a big problem. And the people there, we have created a civil war there. And the fact that we go over there and we violate their security and the people rebel against the government because they see their government as being a puppet of the American government, so it’s total chaos, and I am afraid — I hope I’m absolutely wrong — but I’m afraid we will be in Pakistan trying to occupy that country, and it will probably be very unsuccessful.”

Nor is this the only conspiracy theory that Paul spins in this segment. Two minutes after dismissing conspiracy theorists, Paul states that he doesn’t believe the account from the White House on when Osama bin Laden was killed, when they got the DNA, and asks if anyone at MSNBC has any information on it. “But — that’s a conspiracy theory!” the panel says, sounding shocked, shocked! that Paul might float such a notion. Don’t stop there, though, because Paul then explains the factual basis of his prediction that the US will occupy a nation of over 140 million people, armed with nuclear weapons.

And to think that some people don’t take his presidential bid seriously …