Ridiculing easily established facts

I mentioned in my column last week that the mainstream media, and even to some extent the Tea Party, seem to be doing everything they can to marginalize GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul.

This despite the fact that, interestingly enough, the latest Rasmussen poll shows Paul running 1 point behind President Obama, within the sampling error, "if the election were held today."

By this measure, Rep. Paul is now running second among GOP hopefuls, bested only by Mitt Romney, who still leads the incumbent by several percentage points. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who's not too sure about that evolution business, trails.

But how often do you hear anyone refer to "the two GOP front-runners, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul"? The two men, coincidentally, finished one-two in the Nevada GOP caucuses almost four years ago -- a fair warning from a neighboring state about John McCain's electability, had anyone wanted to pay attention.

For the record, no, I don't believe the Grand Old Party is likely to nominate Rep. Paul, unless and until lynch mobs are stringing up Federal Reserve bankers from lamp posts. Since it tapped Eisenhower over Taft, the Republican Party has striven to become the party of "Democrat Lite," offering us a kinder, gentler socialist kleptocrat slave state.

But the mainstream media insist on pretending Rep. Paul "reveals himself to be some kind of nutty professor when he keeps talking about our Monopoly-money dollar and the cabal of private bankers known as the Federal Reserve," I wrote last week.

In the latest example, Alexandra Petri, a member of the Washington Post's editorial page staff, columnized this week that "gold bug" Paul is so wacky he "actually named his son Rand," and he "believes that a silver dime can pay for $3 of gas."

"Believes"? Do we generally refer to something being "believed" when its accuracy can be easily ascertained with a few clicks of the keyboard?

Go to http://www.kitcosilver.com/. Here you can easily learn that silver was selling, when I wrote this column, at $39.68 per ounce. (It had dropped close to $30 by Friday; it'll probably be up again this week.)

Because a pre-1965 silver dime contains not a tenth-ounce of silver, but only .072 ounces, this means you can take a silver dime to any pawnshop or coin store and get something in the range of $2.85 in current, inflated Federal Reserve notes or cupronickel sandwich coinage for that little piece of silver, which you can then use to drive across the street to the nearest gas station and buy $2.85 worth of gasoline, give or take.

Yes, the buyer may pay you a few pennies less -- his profit margin. But because the price of silver was a bit higher when Rep. Paul made his statement, how does his "believing" these facts make him some kind of wacko? In fact, what does it tell us about any adult not living in a group home that they somehow find this statement odd? Do the staff of The Washington Post really pretend not to know that the Federal Reserve has inflated our currency so much that a dollar bill will now buy what you could have bought in 1964 for three copper cents -- while you'd be lucky to buy a battered old silver dollar, today, for anything less than 30 current greenbacks?

"Paul is not a serious candidate," opined Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle on Sept. 9.

Her proof? "During the debate, he advocated privatizing air traffic control and said that prescription drug regulation 'does as much harm as good.' "

Oh, that proves it. Why, the next thing you know, he'll be proposing we privatize railroads and the oil industry.

The FDA exists primarily to protect the monopoly of the big drug companies against upstart competitors who can't afford to jump through the bought-off bureaucrats' million-dollar hoops, threatening to jail people who advertise the established health benefits of vitamins and other natural herbs and supplements while providing cover for who knows how many toxic nostrums.

And challenging this set-up proves you're "not serious"?

Anyone wishing further amplification of this point is encouraged to check out the latest from health writer Bill Sardi at http://lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi185.html.

"The primary thrust of the FDA's anti-supplement efforts has been to maintain that dietary supplements are unnecessary for any person who eats properly, 'a feeling that has continued to persist within the agency up to this very day,' " according to Peter Barton Hutt, former chief counsel of the FDA and senior counsel with the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling LLP.

"This is in the face of the fact that the government's 5-A-Day program to eat fruits and vegetables has miserably failed to reduce mortality rates for heart disease and cancer. ...

"Then-Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., pushed through Congress the Vitamin-Mineral Amendments of 1976, which further reduced FDA flexibility in regulating dietary supplements, says Hutt. Frustrated and bending to the will of the people, in 1979 FDA revoked all of the regulations it had propagated in 1972."

But "the FDA now seeks to implement a new guideline that would force all supplements dating back to the passage of the 1994 DSHEA (Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act) to undergo toxicity and birth-defect studies, a requirement that would (be) so expensive it would quash the entire industry, require more than $50 billion of testing which represents the entire estimated profits produced by the industry for 20 years, a guideline ... that would surely eliminate thousands of products from retail store shelves and place hundreds of thousands of Americans workers into unemployment lines," Mr. Sardi reports.

"The FDA has aimed a death blow at the industry."

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of the novel "The Black Arrow" and "Send in the Waco Killers." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.