Reid My Lips

Few things invoke mirth in my blackened cynical heart more than when Republicants deride Harry Reid as if we Democrats have a deep emotional bond with his august self.  I've considered Reid to be useless for years now, arrogant and privileged yet clueless as to why he has any status at all, a hollow thinner cartoon of Sergeant Schultz.  I think, and I'm not alone, that Harry Reid is a joke of a Senator (and don't get me started on his counterpart, Pelosi.)  So it suprises me not one tiny tittle that Reid would assume that America's rejection of corrupt and dispicable Republican lies and incompetence was somehow a holy and dogmatic writ for his canonization as one to the Sainted Order of Impo'tent Peoples.

His actions over the last week have essentially proven that his own self-importance has blinded him to what America is all about ... the law.  First, he refuses to sit and have sworn a lawfully appoiinted Senator, blaming everyone but himself in the process.  Because of his shenanegans, he refused to sit another legally elected Senator (both Democrats, mind you.)  And in the process, he tells a most popular President-elect to piss up a rope concerning the actions of the Senate.  I think this guy might be politically dumber than LIEberman.  Truly, that's saying something.

Buress will be a US Senator.  Al Franken will be a US Senator.  Barack Obama will be a capable President, and this will happen in spite of the fact that Harry Reid has acted like a big ignert dick.   Reid doesn't have a clue of the changes that are sweeping him under, and he will lose whatever power game he thinks he's playing.

But what really prompted this post was this:

The Majority Leader thinks former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens shouldn't face jail time for his seven-count federal conviction last year, telling our Manu Raju, who was also in the room, "My personal feeling, you guys, I don't know what good that [would do]... He was a real war hero too, you know. He's been punished enough."

Punished, how?  The guy lost his Senate seat in an election.  He abused the public trust in an illegal way and lost an election (arguably because the public, even in Alaska, doesn't much cotton to criminals running the country.)  Is being a Senator so much of a value that not being a Senator is the same as a criminal sentence?  Isn't that what Harry Reid is saying?

Let's be clear.  If you, I or anyone we know get caught stealing a couple hundred grand on the job we would lose that job and spend a few tens of dozen days in a fine state institution, becoming intimately familiar with concrete, steel bars and concertina wire (and hopefully not our cell-mate.)  We wouldn't just get voted off the island to a comfortable retirement in God's paradise of wilderness and log homes.  I have sympathy for Ted Tubes Stevens because of his age, and hope that some leniency is offered for that alone.  But I also respect the law enough to know that if he is offered leniency, it is at the will of a compassionate society.  It sure as hell shouldn't be because he has "suffered enough" in any way, shape or form.

Ultimately, Reid's bullshit statement isn't about Stevens at all.  It is about how Harry Reid sees being a US Senator.  He sees it as a position being above the law of the little people, such that losing that position is horrific.  What a total ass.  It is my sincere hope that Harry Reid faces that awful "punishment" in November next year.

(And, just to funnel any derogatory comments into a filter I make fun of, I don't like Reid 'cause he's a Mormon ...)

Comments

[Mark T]

Reid has but one problem, one thing that troubles him: : liberals. Then he straightens his spine and becomes a man.

[rapier]

Somewhat arbitrarily I date the brain death of the Democratic Congressional Party at 1972. 37 years is a long time to be dead, and still walking and talking. It's fitting the Democratic Senate leader looks like death warmed over. His brain obviously slower than those lurching zombies you see in all the movies.

The legislative branch itself is dead. A sideshow of bad melodrama and low comedy. Thus we get the unitary executive which in the best of hands cannot possibly do and think of everything so will mess up mightily, and in the worst of hands, Bush, becomes an evil thing.

The American system of constitutional government has been dead for some time and it's replacement, corporate governance, just failed too. Together, the story of the economic crisis. How much longer this zombie system can stumble forward is any ones guess but I would say not much longer. Easily measured in months.