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Posted at 10:17
AM ET, 08/06/2012
Harry Reid’s
gutter politics
In
“The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His
name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is
Harry Reid.
Reid
is where he loves to be: the center of controversy. He has accused Mitt Romney
of paying no taxes for 10 years. Romney denies the accusation and challenged
Reid to put up or shut up. In an apparent response, Reid repeated the charges
on the Senate floor. Countless aides have echoed their boss. They and he
attribute their information to a source they will not name.
Whether
such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did
indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that
sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and
(2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not
done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the
charge is true or not. He would prefer the former, but he’ll settle for the
latter.
For Reid, this is yet another brazen and tasteless
partisan attack. As majority leader, he has managed to sink the public image of
the Senate even lower than it would otherwise be. He contributes to bad
feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done
for political advantage. Reid is a crass man, the very personification of the
gaudy and kitschy Las Vegas Strip.
Still,
he is not some backbencher, but the Senate majority leader. He is the face of
the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a
single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid. The White House has been
given the chance and explicitly ducked its duty. Other members of the Senate
have run for cover. They fear Reid and, if truth be told, sort of like what
he’s doing — constantly needling Romney, keeping him on the defensive about
taxes and his insistence on releasing only two years of his returns.
The
politics of this squabble are delightful. But Reid has managed to draw both his
party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the
Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long
time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.
As
for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us
all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring
rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of
Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/harry-reids-gutter-politics/2012/08/06/b3546bfe-dfcf-11e1-8fc5-a7dcf1fc161d_blog.html
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