Reid on the couch

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sat down for an interview with BuzzFeed reporters John Stanton and Kate Nocera. It sounds like Reid might have been in a recumbent position during the interview. Reid has a few “issues” to work out. As you could easily guess, the Koch brothers were on Reid’s “mind,” such as it is. Here is the opening of the Stanton/Nocera report:

Frustrated by the “sewer” of modern American political campaigns, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Wednesday said that he would bring a constitutional amendment to the floor granting Congress the ability to set strict new limits on campaign contributions, warning he will force multiple votes if necessary to pass the measure.

“When I came to Congress, when you got money you had to list who you got it from, what their occupation was, address, and phone numbers if you had it. Then I saw things change. In 1998, [former Sen.] John Ensign and I ran against one another and we spent about $10 million in Nevada,” Reid told BuzzFeed during an interview in his Capitol office.

“Neither one of us outspent the other, but most of the money we spent was corporate money because there was a loophole where corporate money could flow through the state party. That was an election that was awful. I won it, but just barely. I felt it was corrupting, all this corporate money,” Reid added.

Things had changed for the good, he said, by 2004. “I felt so clean and pure with McCain-Feingold, which had come into being, it was wonderful. We were back where we should have been,” he said.

Then the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United ruling, Reid said, opening the flood gates to hundreds of millions of largely unregulated money to SuperPACs. “It was as if I had jumped into the sewer…it’s awful what has happened.”

Once upon a time, Harry Reid felt clean and pure. Now he feels dirty, as though he has jumped into a sewer. Why might that be?

Those of us observing from the outside have found Reid to be a one-man sewer. Reid attributes his feelings of dirtiness to the the Supreme Court and the “Koch Brothers.” He wants to feel clean and pure again. I believe what we have here is a nasty case of what the psychiatrists refer to as projection, but I freely confess that I am over my head.

If given the opportunity to interview Harry Reid, I would probe more deeply than Stanton and Nocera do. They seem to be happy taking dictation from him. It’s not enough, not by a long shot, but someone should be able to put what they have come up with to good use.

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