Any minute now, Harry "Gollum" Reid might march to the Senate microphone and accuse the Koch brothers of hijacking the missing Malaysian airliner. Our worthless media would relay his charges, while looking politely away from the ongoing derangement of the little man from Nevada.
What a real media would do is hold him accountable, discredit him, and bleed his pathetic corpse dry, same as they didn't do when he invented the lie that Mitt Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. But Reid is a powerful Democrat and the guardian of what’s left of Obama’s agenda. So, the unwritten script for Big Hairs and Big Pens is no follow up, no accountability. This guttersnipe of a politician still leads the US Senate and still makes news. And the lapdogs lap up his bile.
The Majority Leader is spearheading a vicious smear campaign against two private citizens, Charles and David Koch, whose sins are this: They are enormously successful businessmen, employing 60,000 well-paid Americans and they generously support political causes and candidates Reid opposes (as well as providing astonishing philanthropic support to things like hospitals and orchestras—David Koch’s last gift of $100 million to a hospital was protested by stooges from labor and the NAACP).
The Kochs are major backers of Americans for Prosperity, a group running powerful ads slamming Democrat Senate candidates with the lies and failures of Obamacare. Reid can’t have that. So, from the floor of the United States Senate, he has taken to regularly slandering and demonizing the Kochs personally. Here are a few highlights:
- "When you make billions of dollars a year you can be as immoral and dishonest as your money will allow you to be. It's too bad that they're trying to buy America, and it's time that the American people spoke out against this terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-American as anyone I can imagine."
- ”What is un-American is when shadowy billionaires pour unlimited money into our democracy to rig the system to benefit themselves and the wealthiest one percent. I believe in an America where economic opportunity is open to all. And based on their actions and policies they promote, the Koch brothers seem to believe in an America where the system is rigged to benefit the very wealthy.”
- “Think about what an America rigged by the Koch brothers would look like. The Koch brothers don't care about creating a strong public education system in America.”
- He’s said charming things like “Republicans are addicted to Koch” (it’s pronounced “coke”) and he groundlessly accused the Kochs of holding aid to Ukraine hostage to pass new rules protecting them from the IRS.
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Actually, a high government official blasting private citizens from the immunity of the lofty Senate Chamber for opposing him and his party’s agenda is about as un-American as anything I can imagine. It’s a pungent load of hypocrisy that stinks even by Harry Reid’s standards. Reid is delighted when billionaires like George Soros, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pat Stryker, David Geffen, Oprah Winfrey, or green crony Tom Steyer support Democrats, whether in the light or in the shadows.
Moreover, unlike a lot of crony Democrat supporters, the Kochs can’t be accused of lining their own pockets with tax dollars or market rigging schemes. They support groups that fight for limited government and free markets that benefit the climate for all business, not special deals and kickbacks for themselves. The contrast is stark with Reid’s favorite money bags, like big labor, trial lawyers, investment bankers, and all manner of favor seekers who actually are trying to buy legislation to make them richer at our expense. All the Kochs want is the freedom to do business and provide Americans what we demand.
Reid’s shrillness reflects the panic spreading among Democrats as a tarnished president, a struggling economy, a famine of jobs, and a disastrous health care program darken the Democrat landscape heading into midterm elections. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just Harry, who has always been a nasty piece of graceless work and he’s never paid a price for it.
Reid’s famous slander that an anonymous investor told him Romney paid no tax for 10 years planted the subject of Romney’s tax returns in the spotlight for critical weeks of the 2012 campaign, keeping the candidate on the defensive and the focus off the incumbent’s serious problems. But when records showed Romney paid millions in taxes the prior two years, and his portfolio was not structured to avoid taxable income, the subject just dropped. There were no microphones in Reid’s face demanding an explanation, no disgruntled calls for the Senate leader to explain himself or his scurrilous accusations. No loss of stature.
Reid remained perched in his snipers nest. And his media amplifiers remained poised for his next lies.
This is the same man who gratuitously called Justice Clarence Thomas “an embarrassment” and said his opinions were not well-written. Reid could cite no opinion to back up his insult. Later reporting by CBS’s Jan Crawford Greenburg and others revealed Thomas is an intellectual force on the court and highly respected by his colleagues. Reid just made his slander up.
He’s been at it for years. Reid’s MO is to deliver some of the ugliest smears in politics in his soft, nasally whisper. The media’s MO is to relay the message and shelter the messenger. They’ve got this do-si-do down.
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