The current thinking about Ron Paul...

...is that the 76-year-old Congressman probably won't mount a third-party bid for president this year so as not to alienate the GOP establishment. Huh? Bear with me. Apparently, Paul's son Rand, the junior senator from Kentucky, has White House aspirations of his own and an independent run by his father might damage his standing with the Republican Party muckety-mucks. Again, huh?

Okay, I follow the reasoning. But ... Rand Paul was (and is) a tea party iconoclast who ran against the Republican Party establishment and its hand-picked candidate in the 2010 election. You remember the 2010 election, don't you? It's the one we'll all look back at it as the high water mark of the tea party movement.

As the economy recovers, as it surely must, all those angry white geezers will put away their homemade signs of President Obama-as-the-Joker and go back to playing shuffleboard -- or whatever it was they were doing -- when the Bush administration bailed out Wall Street in the fall of 2008.

And Rand Paul? Don't be too surprised if he turns out to be a One-Term Wonder. In 2016, when Paul is up for reelection, the economy could be humming along just fine, thank you, and a moderate Democrat -- who would promise to bring home the pork -- could turn him out of office handily. And Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP establishment would be privately cheering, Good riddance, you pain in the butt!

Or, as the late Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago once famously put it, "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

After that, the Republicans could run a nice, safe party hack regular -- who knows how to follow instructions from the hierarchy -- for the seat. And Rand Paul would be free to go back to the wilderness somewhere and rant about the gold standard and the need to abolish the Federal Reserve.