Playing The Reid Card

by Bob Livingston 
It appears that as its main campaign strategy to wrest control of the Senate from the Democrats, the GOP will play the Reid card. That’s a reference to Senator Harry Reid, the man who has openly and unabashedly stated that anyone who opposes a big, overbearing and over-militarized government is a “domestic terrorist.”
But it’s not Reid’s belief that patriots are terrorists, or his past claims that Tea Party members are “anarchists” that Republicans are using in their strategy. By their silence on those remarks, the Republican establishment apparently agrees with Reid.
What they’re targeting in campaign ads and speeches is Reid’s corruption and his efforts to push President Barack Obama’s “liberal agenda.”
Of course, Reid’s corruption is a target-rich environment. Almost his entire adult life has been spent as a non-producer, sucking of the teats of local, State and national government. The website Real Clear Politics notes that his career in politics began 40 years ago as small city’s attorney. He was elected to a local hospital’s board of trustees, then ran for and won a seat on Nevada’s Assembly. Two years later he was elected Nevada’s lieutenant governor.

Aiming still higher, Reid ran for the U.S. Senate in 1974, but lost. A year later, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas and lost again. For the next three years, Reid toiled as an attorney out of public life (and the only time in his professional career he wasn’t receiving a government check).
In 1977, Nevada Governor Mike O’Callaghan — Reid’s friend and mentor — appointed Reid chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. It’s the only period when Reid may have done something substantive: He was filmed by the FBI trying to choke someone, supposedly for attempting to bribe him; and he so upset the Vegas mob bosses that they put a bomb in Reid’s wife’s car. (The bomb was discovered before it exploded.) 

[oped: Clarification on the above comment: Dirty Harry was aware of the FBI filming as was his Mob Boss...they staged it to appear as if Dirty Harry was not on the take when in fact he was in the Mobs back pocket all along...Dirty Harry was aware of the bomb in his wifes car...it was planted to give Dirty Harry credibility and to distance his affiliation with the Mob Bosses! SEE: http://sharlaslabyrinth.blogspot.com/2013/12/harry-money-mob-influence-in-harry.html and  http://sharlaslabyrinth.blogspot.com/2014/04/harry-reid-and-son-called-crooks-by.html ]

He ran for and won a seat in the U.S. House in 1982, and was elected to the Senate in 1987, where he’s been ever since.
In that time, despite never holding a real job, Reid advanced himself from being the simple son of an alcoholic miner living in a small cabin to being a multimillionaire and one of the four most powerful men in America.
In its piece on Reid, RCP asks the $10 million (Reid’s peak worth as reported on financial disclosure forms) question: “How did Reid manage to grow his net worth so significantly while raising a large family, on a public official’s salary, and incurring the expenses associated with maintaining two residences on opposite sides of the country?”

RCP breaks down in the article that Reid has always walked on the edge of corruption his entire career, occasionally stepping over it enough to create smoke but never enough fire to burn his career to the ground.
Of course, Reid’s hands are all over the Bureau of Land Management’s assault on Cliven Bundy’s ranch and cattle.
His son, Rory, helped broker a land deal with Chinese interests to sell the land in the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone; and Reid’s puppet and former chief of staff Neil Kornze is head of BLM. Since the BLM backed down from its assault, Reid has repeatedly stated in no uncertain terms that the issue is not over and that Bundy — and by implication the “domestic terrorists” who sided with him — will face consequences.
Reid, as a U.S. Senator elected to represent all Nevadans, wouldn’t come down so hard against his constituents were he not involved in the land deal up to at least his elbows.
As Reid’s corruption is a target-rich environment, so is his hypocrisy. After Bundy pontificated on the evils of government entitlements and how it has created a class of slaves — words The New York Times held for four days before releasing them selectively edited so the regime’s propaganda machine could tar Bundy as a “racist” — Reid called Bundy “a hateful racist” with “extreme, hateful views, and dangerous.” Never mind that Reid uttered the “racist” term “negro” in a conversation about the future President’s dialect and got a veritable pass from the ruling class.

And lately, in those rare moments when Reid’s eye drifts from the dollar signs he sees in his Nevada land deals, he has spent a great deal of effort disparaging those “evil and rich” Koch brothers and everybody in the Tea Party who may have crossed their path, even though he and most of the Democrat Party have benefited from Koch largess.
Reid’s latest attack on Bundy would create high dudgeon if we lived in a sane world: That is, one in which things were as they are presented, with an honest media, a government that respected the Constitution and the rule of law and in which all people understood from where all rights emanate and what they are and that it is people, not governments, who have rights.
But we live in a world in which a psychopathic statist taker (Reid) who has enriched himself off of government can disparage, threaten and intimidate without consequence hardworking Americans who speak the truth to power.
And if we lived in a sane world: That is, one in which there was no protected political elite class and in which people could find “representatives” to send to government who would actually represent the people rather than the moneyed elites, themselves and their cronies, then Harry Reid and Barack Obama and John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi and any of the other hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of politicians and bureaucrats who had enriched themselves or their friends and families by stomping all over the law, the Constitution and the backs of the people in their climb to power would be behind bars if not swinging from ropes.

But in the world we live in the messengers change language on a whim; crimes are invented from whole cloth or dismissed as irrelevant, depending upon the mood of the persecutors or the propagandists or the rank of the criminal; the government has not only decided that the protections outlined in the Constitution are irrelevant, but it has ignored those protections without consequence; the money printers destroy our wealth; the lifestyle of the American middle class burns; and people are pushed to the point of revolt as the most powerful politicians in America agitate and employ government agencies against the people.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, supposedly the party of limited government and supportive of the rule of law, plans to play the Reid card passively rather than as a trump. It points only toward Reid’s “liberalism” and the fact that he’s “dirty and unethical” but ignores the bigger crime: his use of government as a cudgel to intimidate and oppress those who want to restore Constitutional governance.
If the Republicans played that Reid card, they’d hold a winning hand.