(Editor's note: This is one of three articles on Ron Paul in the December 8 issue of the River Cities' Reader. The package also includes Kathleen McCarthy's "Ron Paul Personifies Iowa GOP Party Platform" editorial and Todd McGreevy's "Media Manipulation and Ron Paul.")

Establishment political personalities are quick to claim poor "electability" to diminish Ron Paul's chances because they presume that Paul holds no positive advantage in a head-to-head matchup against President Barack Obama in the general election. That's an apparent premise of their calculation.

This is either a sublime miscalculation or a profound deception. If Ron Paul can win the Republican nomination, the path to the White House could seem downhill by comparison. Why?

Unprecedented debt circumstances demand an unprecedented re-imagining of U.S. government priorities and obligations. The U.S. national debt is categorically unsustainable and, literally, it's now mathematically impossible to repay, too. That the debt, banking, and finance system is increasingly proven to be a rigged Ponzi scheme in mainstream media only underlines Ron Paul's tenured criticism of the oligarchical Federal Reserve system itself. Further, increasing numbers of voters awaken daily to the direct correlation between endless foreign interventionism and that categorically unsustainable debt that vexes the nation.

Indeed, because of wars, rumors of wars, a fading dollar, climbing prices, hopeless unemployment, and an overreaching federal police state, the time is ripe for Ron Paul's small-government message.

(Editor's note: This is one of three articles on Ron Paul in the December 8 issue of the River Cities' Reader. The package also includes Kathleen McCarthy's "Ron Paul Personifies Iowa GOP Party Platform" editorial and Dave Trotter's "Electability: Ron Paul Soundly Defeats Obama for These 11 Reasons" cover story.)

Voters memories' are getting shorter and shorter, emboldening the mainstream media (MSM) to utterly fabricate information in order to manipulate public opinion regarding Ron Paul's popularity and electability.

At the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference - an annual multi-day event of speakers presented as quintessential conservatives (Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Donald Trump all spoke at this year's convention held in February in Washington, D.C.) - Fox News edited the footage it broadcast by inserting booing during the announcement that Ron Paul had won the straw poll (for second year in a row), when in reality he was getting loud cheers. Fox was called out quickly by direct observers and had to issue an apology, stating, "It was clearly a mistake; we used the wrong videotape." Said Fox's Bill Hemmer, "It's an honest mistake. We apologize for the error. We look forward to having representative Paul back on our program very soon." (RCReader.com/y/media1) How is deliberately altering footage, replacing fact with fiction, an "honest mistake"? What possible explanation could there be for altering any news footage in the first place? It begs the question: How much of this "editing" is going on in other parts of the news?