The dirty little secret about Sen. Harry Reid's failed character assassination attempt against my brother, Rush Limbaugh, is just how contrived the Senate Democrats' outrage was about the fraudulent allegation that Rush had impugned certain soldiers.

I won't rehash the facts in detail, but essentially, Rush was falsely accused of calling troops who had expressed opposition to the Iraq War "phony soldiers."

Not only was Rush not criticizing soldiers, but he was defending soldiers who had been criticized by pretend Iraq War veterans who had lied about their combat service in Iraq to gain credibility when they accused the actual soldiers there of unspeakable atrocities.

If Reid's true instinct was to defend soldiers, he would have agreed with Rush's criticism of the fake soldiers who lied about the real ones. He would have shared Rush's outrage and demanded strict proof.

Sadly, the left all too often has unquestioningly accepted such horrible allegations against our soldiers. Sen. Dick Durbin assumed the worst of our soldiers in Guantanamo. Sen. John Kerry disseminated lies about our troops raiding Iraqi homes and assaulting civilian women and children. And Rep. John Murtha prejudged Marines guilty of murdering innocent civilians before they had even told their side of the story, much less been tried for the alleged crimes.

But did liberals express outrage against Durbin, Kerry or Murtha? No. They vigorously defended them. According to the loony left, the foreign-policy views of (leftist) veterans are sacrosanct and above criticism, even when they are themselves falsely impugning other soldiers. Obviously, the left's loyalty isn't to soldiers -- it's only to outspoken leftist soldiers.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews demonstrated this principle in graphic detail when he allowed his "Hardball" guests Graham Nash and David Crosby to go unchallenged when they maliciously claimed our troops were "killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis."

Nor did anyone else on the left -- as far as I know -- take Matthews to task for nodding with approval as these rockers slandered our soldiers as slaughterers of innocent women and children.

And when Harry Reid and his leftist colleagues, in the name of defending the honor of our troops, used the Senate floor and stationery to defame Rush with false allegations, no liberals had the intellectual honesty to admit the left has made a pastime out of slandering our soldiers. They just piled on with phony indignation.

Though Reid and his boys were lying every step of the way, there's a reason those in their gullible base were so quick to leap to false conclusions about Rush's purely innocuous statements and believe those lies: psychological projection. Continued...