Posted by
Bert Chapman on Monday, January 11, 2010 6:13:44 PM
Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cannot adhere to the victim identity politics of his political party. A forthcoming book on the 2008 presidential campaign quotes Reid as saying Barack Obama's presidential electability was enhanced because he was light skinned and did not have a "black accent" or something to that effect. Once word of this rhetorical transgression got out, the liberal blogosphere was "shocked shocked" in the same way Claude Rains was "shocked" that there was gambling going on in his cinematic Casablanca casino. You would think that 4 1/2 decades after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act that our political discourse would be beyond this imbecility but that's not the case.
GOP Chairman Michael Steele was one of the first to call for Reid's head. Harry Reid is an absolute jerk and I have expressed my contempt for him in an earlier blog posting. Almost five years ago my wife and I were dining in a Italian restaurant in Washington DC's Foggy Bottom district a few blocks from the Kennedy Center. Harry Reid himself sat with some of his cronies in a table just across the aisle and I one of the biggest regrets of my life was that I did not go over and tell him what a jerk he is. Still I actually had a evanescent flicker of sympathy for him as this maelstrom descended on him.
A few years ago then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was rhetorically crucified and forced out of his position for waxing nostalgic about Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign at a gathering honoring the South Carolina Senator. Lott's comments did not affect the ability of anyone to believe or not believe any particular political position, yet the leftist apparatchiks of approved political discourse deemed Lott's comments worthy of consigning him to political oblivion. Sadly, many of Lott's GOP compatriots capitulated to the political left's idiotic response to Lott's misplaced historical nostalgia.
The difference between Lott and Harry Reid is remarkable. Reid, in a going to Canossa moment for his heresy, immediately called Pope Barack I and abjectly expressed his purported contrition for his failings, and the Pontiff you can belief in granted him instantaneous absolution for his "sin". (I'll leave it to theologians to determine if Reid's failings fall into the venial or venal realm.) Reid is up for reelection this year and if Nevada voters really want to improve public policy in this country and atone for their 1986 sin of electing Harry Reid to the U.S. Senate, they can achieve a large measure of absolution by evicting Harry Reid from the Senate and returning him to the desert outside Las Vegas. Perhaps room for him can be found in the depths of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.