Harry Reid to step down, says not due to “exercise accident”

Until today, New York Times reporter Carl Hulse reminds us, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has insisted he’s running for reelection. In the video below, however, Reid announces that he will not face the voters again next year. He will step down from his Senate seat.

Reid still insists (and Hulse dutifully states it as a fact) that Reid’s serious facial and eye injuries resulted from a New Year’s day exercise accident. John expressed doubt in the post “What really happened to Harry Reid?” John observed: “He looks like he has been in a fight, and not with an elastic band.”

In the video, Reid also insists right at the top that his injuries have nothing to do with his retirement. Reid’s denial that his injuries have led to his retirement seem to me to signify the opposite. Given Reid’s habitual alienation from the truth, I infer that Reid’s “exercise accident” must be a substantial contributing factor.

Whether or not that is the case, I would like to add this historical note occasioned by Reid’s service as Majority Leader. His service in office as Majority Leader proved a disgrace. The Washington Free Beacon, for example, compiled the video below of Reid chanting “Koch brothers” 134 times on the Senate floor in those happy days before his “exercise accident.” Reid’s chant had a formulaic quality, like the phrases Homer held in reserve to fill out dactylic hexameter lines in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

What “wine-dark sea” was to Homer, “Koch brothers” was to Harry Reid in 2014. Like Achilles and Odysseus, the “Koch brothers” had simply been turned into mythical figures, although the result fell short of any art other than character assassination. Reid wasn’t in search of a formulaic phrase to fill out a metrical line. He was simply executing the latest Democratic campaign to stigmatize private citizens in the service of his partisan political purposes.

Reid also took to the floor of the Senate to lie about Mitt Romney in 2012. At the time, of course, unlike the Koch brothers, Romney was a candidate for higher office.

Reid has demonstrated an infinite capacity for disgrace, dishonesty and hypocrisy. He has made himself the true face of the Democratic Party in the Age of Obama.

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