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.

While Rush would never consider condemning a soldier fighting to defend the United States, irrespective of his political views, the left often treats one's political views as disqualifying him from legitimacy as a member of a certain group.

Consider how they treat blacks, like Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice, who don't subscribe to their leftist agenda. The left holds itself out as the savior of African Americans yet often treats with scorn conservative blacks.

To them, Thomas and Rice aren't authentic blacks but Uncle Toms who not only aren't entitled to protection against racial insensitivity but deserve to be subjected to it, as with the vulgar leftist racist cartoons depicting Condi Rice as a thick-lipped Aunt Jemima. Liberals didn't hold their fellow travelers accountable for those racist caricatures because liberals aren't champions of black people -- they're only champions of those blacks who subscribe to their political agenda and who will help keep them in power.

But I digress. If Harry Reid et al. wanted to be taken seriously with their manufactured fable about Rush, they shouldn't have feigned outrage at him for allegedly criticizing soldiers. That just doesn't pass the laugh test.

Then again, Reid knows he can get away with such abominable behavior because no lie is too low if it advances the cause -- and there is no better cause in their minds than destroying their most powerful nemesis, Rush.

For absolute proof of this, you need look no further than a recent New York Times story reporting Reid's thoroughly discredited lies about Rush as if they were fact. The Times also reported as legitimate Reid's preposterous ploy to pretend he had been working in concert with Rush's radio syndication partners to maximize proceeds from Rush's unilateral auctioning of Reid's letter attempting to smear him. This, even though everyone knows the only reason the letter brought more than $2.1 million (plus Rush's match) was that it memorializes and showcases Harry Reid's shameful abuse of power.

Alas, not everyone is as credulous as Reid would hope, as his cratering poll numbers in Nevada reveal. From what I hear, those aren't phony numbers.