U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s histrionics, hyperbole and false, baseless accusations against those he imagines to be his enemies have finally caught up with him.
They caused the the collective heads of the editorial staff at his hometown newspaper to explode — and the paper confronted the senator in style with its scathing Saturday editorial.
“Harry Reid is the da Vinci of distraction,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial said.“The moment any scandal, policy failure or political defeat crashes down on him — and there have been plenty the past few years — the Senate majority leader unleashes outrageous rhetoric that’s better suited for a sandbox than what once passed for the world’s greatest deliberative body. Worse, the Nevada Democrat has become especially fond of slinging race cards just to crank up the outrage.”
The editorial was prompted by Reid’s Senate floor excoriation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Hobby Lobby decision. “The one thing we are going to do during this work period, sooner rather than later, is to ensure that women’s lives are not determined by virtue of five white men,” Reid said.
The editorial continued:
That Sen. Reid would inject race into criticism of a ruling with gender-based ramifications was bad enough. What made the comment far worse, however, was that it was completely false. Justice Clarence Thomas, who happens to be black, sided with the court’s majority in the Hobby Lobby case.
Sen. Reid’s slip was no accident. He believes racial and ethnic minorities are ideologically monolithic constituencies who are incapable of independent or — gasp! — right-of-center thinking. In the majority leader’s mind, Mr. Thomas is not an African-American because the justice doesn’t blindly subscribe to liberal orthodoxy.
Further into its commentary, the Review-Journal makes a “look who’s calling the kettle black?” comparison of his words — “five white men,” with his own Senate leadership:
Never mind that Sen. Reid himself, like the entire Senate Democratic leadership, is as white as an Irishman in a snowstorm. And never mind that after more than five years of Democratic control of the White House and the Senate, black and Hispanic unemployment — especially among teenagers — remains scandalously high. Sen. Reid’s “fix” for this problem — a higher minimum wage — will actually make it worse.
The top four positions in the Senate Democratic leadership are Reid as majority leader, President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy from Vermont, Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin representing Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York, who is Vice Chair of the Conference and Chair of the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Center.
They’re all white guys.
Former Hewlitt-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina dismissed the left’s “War on Women” during her appearance last Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” She did so by reading a prop to host Candy Crowley, according to TruthRevolt:
My husband and I were having Chinese food the other day and I opened my fortune cookie and here’s what my fortune said: ‘Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.’
Incidentally, back in 2008, Reid described President Obama as “light-skinned” but having “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”
He just can’t leave race out of the equation.
