02.25
It’s very easy just to laugh at the “idiot” when he raises a question that seems totally foreign to our own experience with a given subject. But, that’s a reflex we would do well to conquer. For, what happens when, later, a little research proves the idiot’s question to be more than tangential? Uninformed mockery is one of the dumbest activities to engage in. It’s rhetorical suicide. Bernanke, evidently, is not aware of this.
After Ron Paul raised questions about possible past Federal Reserve misdeeds including allegations of involvement in Watergate payoffs, Ben Bernanke answered smugly: “These specific allegations you’ve made, I think are absolutely bizarre.”
The crowd reflexively laughed at Dr. No’s perceived looniness and pundits have already depicted his concerns as “wild” and “odd.”
Well, it seems that Paul may have been onto something . . . or at the very least raised legitimate questions that deserve investigation. A few minutes on Google News produced this 1982 story from the Milwaukee Sentinel by Richard Bradee of the paper’s Washington bureau:
“Police who searched the room the Watergate burglars used found $4,200 in $100 dollar bills, all numbered in sequence. Proxmire asked the Federal Reserve Board where the money came from. As he explained in a letter to the late Rep. Wright Patman (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Banking Committee: ‘I got the biggest run-around in years. They ducked, misled, lied, and gave me the idiot treatment.’”
