Didn't this clown promise to go away?



Remember when Harry totally lied about Romney's taxes?

What a nasty little man.

Is it McCarthyism or simply the pursuit of traditional Communist disinformation strategies by the formerly anti-communist liberal wing of American politics?

Harry Reid's performance in enjoying the revelation of his lies about Romney during the last election is a reminder of why we will be so lucky to see the last of this nasty piece of human wreckage.

//But McCarthyism isn’t limited to one party or ideology. And if liberals have any sense of self-awareness they will recognize the tactic has returned and is growing in their back yard.

Harry Reid, the top Democrat in the Senate, was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash this week if he regretted his 2012 accusation on the Senate floor that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney “hasn’t paid taxes for ten years.”

Reid presented no evidence at the time and claimed he didn’t need any: “I don’t think the burden should be on me. The burden should be on him. He’s the one I’ve alleged has not paid any taxes.” Reid’s response in the interview was fascinating. When asked by Bash if his tactic was McCarthyite he visibly shrugged on camera, smiled, and said “Well, they can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win, did he?” White House spokesman Josh Earnest refused to criticize Reid for his comment because it “was three years old,” when in reality Reid’s televised reveling in it was only three days old.

Las Vegas journalist Jon Ralston, who has observed Reid over the latter’s 30-year career in the Senate, has had enough. He revealed that he had written a harshly critical column in 2012 about Reid’s “ruthless, Machiavellian politics” in response to the senator’s accusation against Romney but saw it spiked by the Las Vegas Sun because its editor wanted to protect Reid.//

Reading "Disinformation" by former Romanian head of foreign intelligence Ion Pacepa is a weird experience.  Pacepa describes the habituation of the techniques of "disinformation" - the Communist technique of recreating the past and selling that recreation by planting the story in congenial media locations throughout the world. The techniques involve finding a "kernel of truth," projecting Communist crimes onto the target, and mass distribution onto a target audience by supposedly neutral sources in order to "frame" a subject before the subject can react.

Certainly, disinformation is something that happens in normal politics, but in society committed to truth it ought to be an embarrassment, if only, as Pacepa documents, reliance on disinformation is like a drug, the need for which grows the more it is used, and, like a drug, it distorts the user's perception of reality.

Time to retire.

I totally didn't pay attention to Harry Reid's injuries until he announced his retirement, and now I wonder how strongly the two are connected.

Most incompetent elites in history...

...trading mass murderers for traitors...

....selling out allies...

...and now the guy 4 heart beats from the Presidency was maybe in the pockets of the Mafia.

Are we supposed to care about the possibility of the guy in charge of 1/2 of 1/3 of our country being in the pocket of the Mafia?

Or is this another of those unthinkable things that we aren't permitted to wonder about unless it involves a Republican?

//When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.//

//A friend of mine was in Las Vegas a week or two ago. He talked to a number of people there about Reid’s accident, and didn’t find anyone who believed the elastic exercise band story. The common assumption was that the incident resulted, in some fashion, from Reid’s relationship with organized crime. The principal rumor my friend heard was that Reid had promised to obtain some benefit for a group of mobsters. He met with them on New Year’s Day, and broke the bad news that he hadn’t been able to deliver what he promised. When the mobsters complained, Reid (according to the rumor) made a comment that they considered disrespectful, and one of them beat him up.

Is that what really happened? I have no idea, but it is a more likely story than the elastic exercise band yarn.

What happened to Reid is not just a matter of curiosity. Everyone knows that the Reid family has gotten rich, even though Reid has spent his entire career as a public employee. It is known that a considerable part of his fortune came from being cut in on sweetheart Las Vegas land deals that included at least one person associated with organized crime as a principal. Was the Senate Majority Leader in the pocket of the Mafia? That seems like a question worth exploring, and yet, to my knowledge, not a single investigative reporter has chosen to look into the matter, even with the obvious clue of Reid’s face in front of them.

The deliberate blindness of Democratic Party reporters hasn’t stopped people from speculating about what really happened to Harry Reid, but so far, at least, it has prevented the story from exploding into a major scandal.//

Another enabler self-identifies.

So, both Chris Matthews and Jon Stewart are really unhappy with the Harry Reid strategy of bottling up every bit of legislation that came from the House?

The odd thing is that you would think they discovered this strategy only after Tuesday because they seem to have been silent about it BEFORE the election, which enabled the meme of "Republicans don't have a plan."

//Comedian Jon Stewart railed against President Barack Obama and Democrats Thursday night for playing what he called a “chickens**t gambit” — a political tactic in which he said they refused to act on controversial issues before the election to avoid being negatively impacted at the polls.

“What was he doing before the election?” Stewart asked of Obama, claiming that decisions surrounding the selection of a new attorney general, immigration, tax reform and the Keystone Pipeline were intentionally delayed prior to Tuesday’s elections.

The “Daily Show” host went on to posit that the tactic was an intentional one used by the Democrats as a means to protect themselves in the midterm elections.

“Senate Democrats wanted to avoid votes on contentious issues, so they wouldn’t have to take unpopular [stances] that might cost them reelection and they got the president to go along with it,” Stewart said. “It’s a well-known political maneuver known as the ‘chickens**t gambit.’ It’s named, of course, for Senator Dickless H. Chickens**t.”

He concluded by accusing Democrats of adopting a do-nothing strategy and avoiding acting on what voters elected them to do.//

When Democrats win, elections have consequences...

...when Republicans win, it means that the parties have to work together.


Anonymous reacts to my response of joy to the ouster of Harry Reid and the prospect of investigating the Democrats' use of the IRS to harass grass-roots conservatives by arguing that I'm being mean.

My response:

Harry Reid has been bottling up bills in the Senate for 6 years. Scandal have been treated as "no biggie." Harry Reid played the "nuclear option" by getting rid of the 60 vote required for judicial confirmations. Obama was famous for saying that he won the election and didn't have to be bipartisan and he abused his opponents when he had them trapped. Democrats used the IRS to harass their enemies.

But now you are suddenly concerned about the "tone" of politics??????

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Maybe the next time the Dems have power, they will choose to be bipartisan and watch out for the interests of the nation instead of their party.

Harry Reid still needs to learn the lesson that he doesn't get to act like a dictator for 8 years without consequences;

Consider this karma avoidance by the soon-to-be-ex-Senate Majority Leader, but Harry Reid’s new act won’t fool anyone, least of all Mitch McConnell. Reid has run the US Senate for the past eight years like a dictatorship, steadily eroding minority privileges to the point where Republicans couldn’t offer amendments or put up any significant resistance to Barack Obama’s radical appointments, unless Democrats forced Reid’s hand on either score. After watching his party lay a historic egg in the midterms — the size of which is still not yet fully known — Reid tried spinning the results as a mandate for the kind of compromise that he’s blocked ever since winning control of the upper chamber in 2006:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has reached out to his presumed successor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, saying that he hoped they could work together “to get things done” in Washington.

In a statement, according to Mediaite, Reid said, “I’d like to congratulate Senator McConnell, who will be the new Senate Majority Leader. The message from voters is clear: They want us to work together. I look forward to working with Senator McConnell to get things done for the middle class.”

Er … sure it was. The actual message was entirely a repudiation of the shove-it-down-your-throat approach and demagoguery exemplified by Reid’s leadership and Barack Obama’s attitude. The 2010 midterms sent that same signal, but Reid ignored it and amplified his dictatorial approach in the aftermath of a narrow 2012 win. He’s still not getting the message — or more likely, is willfully ignoring it in order to benefit himself.

Evidence of that has already been provided by Reid and his team. Despite coughing up the worst midterm results in a generation, Reid wants to continue at the helm of Senate Democrats:

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) does not have any second thoughts about staying on as the Senate Democratic leader after the drubbing his party took on election night.

Spokesman Adam Jentleson vowed that Reid will lead his party’s remaining members in the chamber next year.

“Senator Reid will run for minority leader,” he said Tuesday.

Expect to hear people who didn't complain about "tone" under the Reid dictatorship suddenly discover that they really are concerned about "tone."

Harry Reid and Gangster Politics.

How does a person born in poverty become so rich in a state with legalized gambling and prostitution?

How does a humble, longtime public servant like him pay for muscle to rough up someone asking a question?

Is this American democracy?

//Via the Daily Surge, I’m using “aide” because I’m not sure what to call this guy. Is he a staffer? Bodyguard? Some jack-of-all-trades policy advisor/goon? Why does Harry Reid have muscle with him when he walks the halls of Congress? And more importantly, per Mattera’s question, how does a humble, longtime public servant like him pay for it? (Conservatives, and only conservatives, have been asking about that for a long time.)

Watch the clip carefully. Mattera doesn’t seem exercised and he doesn’t make any sudden moves towards Reid, as you might fear from a stranger who’s being antagonistic. He just asks the guy an uncomfortable question, then rephrases it — and suddenly he’s up against the wall, physically restrained. In fact, the goon barely waits for a reply to his question “Are you press?” before shoving him. I’m not sure what answer he was looking for. “Yes, I’m press” would mean he’s physically pushing a journalist around for pursuing an unwelcome topic; “no, I’m not” means … it’s okay to shove random strangers, I guess? In a better world, someone from the NYT or WaPo would see this clip and try asking Reid the same questions. If they get shoved too, that’s a story even our terrible media can’t ignore. (Alternately, some Mitch McConnell staffer could try this after he’s asked an uncomfortable question next year. Think D.C. reporters would take notice?)

The best part is Reid trudging along as the confrontation plays out without bothering to look back. I wonder if that’s because he’s used to things like this happening around him or if it’s just an artifact of how powerful, shady people who are accountable to no one behave.//

Watch the video.

Why Harry Reid nuked the 60 vote rule for confirming judges.

Instapundit shares:

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIALIZES: Why Democrats Packed the Court: The new liberal D.C. Circuit intervenes in a big ObamaCare case.

Exactly as President Obama and Senate Democrats planned, the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has moved to suppress a major challenge to ObamaCare. The gambit is no less remarkable for its nakedness.

Last week the full D.C. Circuit vacated the July decision that some insurance subsidies violate the law’s plain language and agreed to rehear Halbig v. Burwell en banc. ObamaCare’s text authorizes subsidies only through exchanges “established by the State,” so a three-judge panel ruled that the Internal Revenue Service was dispensing them illegally across the 36 exchanges established by the federal government.

Such straightforward statutory interpretation fails the D.C. Circuit’s own high standards for en banc scrutiny. As Washington attorney Adam White recently explained in these pages, since the 1990s the full D.C. Circuit has chosen to rehear merely one or two—and sometimes zero—of the 500 or so cases heard every year. The court’s standard for en banc hearings has been that a panel has overturned a D.C. Circuit precedent, which Halbig does not, or if a matter of “exceptional importance” is implicated, historically meaning some constitutional principle. Reading a statute does not rise to constitutional review.

The difference now is that Harry Reid last year packed the D.C. Circuit with three of President Obama’s nominees, so liberals now outnumber conservatives by eight to five not counting senior judges. The Senate Majority Leader nuked the filibuster rule for judges, allowing them to be confirmed with 51 instead of 60 votes, precisely so the court would become the garbageman to dispose of unpleasant legal challenges to the President’s regulatory decrees. ObamaCare is Exhibit A.//

When the Republicans had control of the Senate, we heard changing the rule described as the "nuclear option," and the press was aghast that such a sacred tradition would be overturned.

When the Democrats had control, they got rid of the rule and not a whisper was heard from the press.

When Republicans again get the Senate, their mission should be to make the Democrats regret their decision and to not give n just because the press starts up again.

Harry Reid - the Bankruptcy of Our Political Class.

Excoriating.

//It seems to me that in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid we have something new under the sun. He revives old-fashioned, LBJ-style corruption in office, as Adam O’Neal’s understated RCP column suggests. He brings pure partisan prevarication and hackery to his office, as Fred Barnes suggests in “Mudslinger in chief.” And he disgraces the institution that he leads, as Victor Davis Hanson judges in “A McCarthy for our time.”

Liberal commentators observe Reid’s shenanigans in the spirit of detached amusement. In this respect Chris Cillizza is representative. It’s the best he and they can do, but it is pathetic.

If that’s the best Cillizza can do as a supposed political junkie — if the chairman of the Republican National Committee is a truer guide to the Reid phenomenon than Cillizza — it’s time for him and his ilk to pursue other opportunities.

As Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid has brought his office to an unprecedented low. There is no lie he will not recite, no libel he will resist so long as it advances some narrow partisan purpose. As Majority Leader, he holds the mirror up to President Obama. They illuminate each other. It’s not a pretty sight.

If Reid had a shred of decency, he would be ashamed. But he doesn’t and he isn’t.

We have, finally, Reid’s nonstop defamation of, and lying about, the Koch brothers. Explored humorously in the video below, it is frankly contemptible and disgusting.//

Harry Reid thinks the bad, disobedient American people should be given a time-out.

The American people must be punished.

//“Well, it’s not over. We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it. So it’s not over,” Reid said.//

Wow!!!!!

If that doesn't drop the mask from the face of who Reid thinks the government is, then nothing will.

Of course, the government did declare war on the American people during hte government shut-down last summer.

So there seems to be a pattern here.

If a private company did this, it would used an example of insane corporate greed...

But since it's only your government - and government means "us" ...except for the part about where "we" share the insane profits reaped by the Harry Reid family - It is hunky-dory.

Over the last two or three decades, the Bureau has squeezed the ranchers in southern Nevada by limiting the acres on which their cattle can graze, reducing the number of cattle that can be on federal land, and charging grazing fees for the ever-diminishing privilege. The effect of these restrictions has been to drive the ranchers out of business. Formerly, there were dozens of ranches in the area where Bundy operates. Now, his ranch is the only one. When Bundy refused to pay grazing fees beginning in around 1993, he said something to the effect of, they are supposed to be charging me a fee for managing the land and all they are doing is trying to manage me out of business. Why should I pay them for that?

And:

But the connection is nevertheless important in two respects. First, BLM has promulgated a regional mitigation strategy for the environmental impacts of the solar developments. Let’s pause on that for a moment: the excuse for limiting Bundy’s rights is the endangered desert tortoise. But wait! Don’t they have desert tortoises a few miles away where the solar projects are being built? Of course they do. That’s where they get to the mitigation strategy, which may involve, among other things, moving some desert tortoises to a new location:

The Gold Butte ACEC is preliminarily recommended as the best recipient location for regional mitigation from the Dry Lake SEZ. This ACEC is located 32 miles (51 km) east of the Dry Lake SEZ.

Gold Butte is the area where Bundy ranches. There are a few problems with the Gold Butte location as a mitigation area; one of them is that there are “trespassing” cattle:

The resource values found in the Gold Butte ACEC are threatened by: unauthorized activities, including off-road vehicle use, illegal dumping, and trespass livestock grazing; wildfire; and weed infestation.

So it is possible that the federal government is driving Bundy off federal lands to make way for mitigation activities that enable the solar energy development to the north. But I don’t think it is necessary to go there. Rather–this is the second and more important point–it is obvious that some activities are favored by the Obama administration’s BLM, and others are disfavored. The favored developments include solar and wind projects. No surprise there: the developers of such projects are invariably major Democratic Party donors. Wind and solar energy survive only by virtue of federal subsidies, so influencing people like Barack Obama and Harry Reid is fundamental to the developers’ business plans. Ranchers, on the other hand, ask nothing from the federal government other than the continuation of their historic rights. It is a safe bet that Cliven Bundy is not an Obama or Reid contributor.

The new head of the BLM is a former Reid staffer. Presumably he was placed in his current position on Reid’s recommendation. Harry Reid is known to be a corrupt politician, one who has gotten wealthy on a public employee’s salary, in part, at least, by benefiting from sweetheart real estate deals. Does Harry Reid now control more than 80% of the territory of Nevada? If you need federal authority to conduct business in Nevada–which is overwhelmingly probable–do you need to pay a bribe to Harry Reid or a member of his family to get that permission? Why is it that the BLM is deeply concerned about desert tortoises when it comes to ranchers, but couldn’t care less when the solar power developers from China come calling? Environmentalists have asked this question. Does the difference lie in the fact that Cliven Bundy has never contributed to an Obama or Reid campaign, or paid a bribe to Reid or a member of his family?

Based on the evidence, I would say: yes, that is probably the difference. When the desert tortoises balance out, Occam’s razor tells us that the distinction is political.

So let’s have some sympathy for Cliven Bundy and his family. They don’t have a chance on the law, because under the Endangered Species Act and many other federal statutes, the agencies are always in the right. And their way of life is one that, frankly, is on the outs. They don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps. It probably has never occurred to them to bribe a politician. They don’t subsist by virtue of government subsidies or regulations that hamstring competitors. They aren’t illegal immigrants. They have never even gone to law school. So what possible place is there for the Bundys in the Age of Obama?//

Gas Chambers?  There are no gas chambers. We are just resettling those cows somewhere to the east.

It's not about tortoises; it is about Reid and corruption.

The new head of the BLM, Neil Kornze, worked for Harry Reid as a policy adviser from 2003 to 2011. It is reasonable to assume that Reid got him the BLM job, and I would hazard a guess that Reid saw the situation turning into a public relations disaster–Nevada’s Governor and Senator Dean Heller, both Republicans, were more or less siding with Bundy–and told Kornze to give it up.

It still isn’t clear what the crisis was all about. Rumor has it that Reid wants the land for a giant solar farm that would be supplied by a Chinese company and, presumably, subsidized by the federal government. Reid’s son is apparently a participant in the deal. Whether that is true, I haven’t yet tried to figure out. One thing I will say with some certainty, however, is that tortoises had little or nothing to do with it.

The real 1%

Harry Reid is a corrupt jerk.

The fact that Harry Reid’s political and influence operation includes his five children has been established for some time. A few weeks ago, when I first heard Reid accuse private citizens of being un-American, I dredged up a Los Angeles Times article from 2003 with the headline, “In Nevada, the Name to Know Is Reid.” Chuck Neubauer and Richard T. Cooper’s meticulously researched and reported article begins with the story of the “Clark County Conservation of Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002,” a land bill of the sort that puts people to sleep. “What Reid did not explain” when he introduced the bill in the Senate, Neubauer and Cooper wrote, “was that the bill promised a cavalcade of benefits to real estate developers, corporations, and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to his sons’ and son-in-law’s firms.” I wonder why he left that part out.

Firms tied to the Reid family, the Los Angeles Times reported, earned more than $2 million from 1998 to 2002 “from special interests that were represented by the kids and helped by the senator in Washington.” How much more have they earned in the 11 years since this article was published? Land, energy, water, gaming, and mining—the Reids manage a diversified portfolio. They are not financial investors but political ones. Reid’s four sons are lawyers, as is his son-in-law. They make their money furthering the interests of paying clients, clients operating businesses in the state represented by Reid.

Those businesses are not necessarily American. After a 2011 trip to China Harry Reid began touting the virtues of ENN Energy Group, a Chinese firm that sought to build a $5 billion solar farm in Nevada. Reid’s son Rory represented ENN, though Rory claimed in a 2012 Bloomberg article never to have discussed “the project with my father or his staff.” Somehow, though, commissioners friendly with the Reid family agreed to sell property to ENN for one-sixth of the land’s appraised value.

Obamacare - Good enough for you...

...but not good enough for the guy who wrote it.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of Obamacare's architects and staunchest supporters, is also the only top congressional leader to exempt some of his staff from having to buy insurance through the law's new exchanges.

Reid is the exception among the other top congressional leaders. GOP House Speaker John Boehner, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have all directed their staffs to join the exchange, their aides said.
After website woes, President pushes benefits of Obamacare

In the charged atmosphere surrounding Obamacare, Reid's decision only gives Republicans more ammo to attack Democrats already suffering politically from the law's botched rollout.

In September, Reid told reporters, "Let's stop these really juvenile political games -- the one dealing with health care for senators and House members and our staff. We are going to be part of exchanges, that's what the law says and we'll be part of that."

Harry Reid fails to deny "serious rumors"...

...baseless, but serious.

As you know by now, when baseless but serious charges are laid against a powerful political figure, it is the responsibility of the maligned individual to prove their innocence.

With that understanding, I requested comment from Harry Reid's office on the swirling charges that someone said they heard from someone that Harry Reid is pederast.

The email response from Reid Spokesman Adam Jentleson can only be characterized as chilling:

Cute

First, note the non-denial. Based on the rumors we've all heard, we can only conclude that at best questions of Reid's abuse remains an open question.

Second, "Cute" is not how I would describe this situation. Senator Reid has been accused by multiple unnamed figures as a serial abuser. The fact that Reid's spokesman thinks anything about this situation is "cute" is disturbing and only leads to more questions about the unreleased records that might (or might not) clear Senator Reid's name.

We will of course be following up on this explosive and developing story....for the children.

Democrats need to "thin the herd" by getting rid of the dumb ones.

Harry Reid Plays Liberal Fizbin.

It's gone beyond parody.

So, demanding that Obama prove that he is a "natural born" American based on hearsay is racist and irrational, even though the hearsay appears might have started because Obama may have been claiming that he was born in Kenya. We know this because Harry Reid told us in 2009 that:

“Let's be clear. It's a phony issue and does not deserve even a minute of our attention on the floor of the United States Senate," Reid announced today, giving the issue just that minute. "It's absurd, irresponsible, baseless and the false claims of long ago have been refuted.”

But Harry Reid can demand that Romney prove that he paid taxes because Reid claims to have hearsay reports that Romney paid no taxes for ten years.

With Nancy Pelosi characterizing Jews as being principally motivated by concern for their ducats and Harry Reid playing liberal fizbin, you havt to think that there might be something to Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. When you think of the insensitive things said by ranking Democrats such as Pelosi, Biden and Reid, you can't help but conclude that the whole party would be helped by culling out the dumbest ones.

Can you say "Projection"?...

...I knew you could.

Janeane Garafolo says that Republicans support Herman Cain because they want to be able to say that they aren't racist:

"Herman Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican party. Conservative movement and tea party movement, one in the same. "People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say 'Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.'"

So, those Republicans support Herman Cain not because he is a succesful businessman who has endorsed the key principles of limited government, but because he's black. 

Unlike Democrats who supported a community organizer, state senator, college instructor and first term senator with absolutely no executive experience because he was, in the words of Joe Biden, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” A sentiment endorsed by Harry Reid, who opined that Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

It all goes to prove the Undeniable Rules of Life, Rule Number 7 - "when someone is accusing you of something you ain't doing, you can bet the farm that they are doing it."