Health-Care Harry Reid Does History; History Loses

by Michael Walsh

The other day  I made the assertion that Barbara Boxer (D – Tiny Town) was the stupidest member of the United States Senate.  I may have spoken too soon.  Here’s a serious challenger:

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Yesterday, in his desperate attempt to win friends, influence people and reach across the aisle as he tries to bring the senate’s version of a “health care” bill to a vote, Sen. Harry Reid (D – Las Vegas) decided to go for broke.  Speaking in his trademark tremulous, reedy voice that makes that of his predecessor, the homunculus from South Dakota, Sen. Tom Daschle (D – IRS), sound like Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” the punch-drunk former boxer compared Republican opposition to the proponents of slavery and segregation.  “When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today…  History is repeating itself before our eyes.”

No words of mine can possibly do justice to the magisterial presentation of the Sage of Searchlight, so please have a look and listen before we continue:

Where to begin?  With a straight face (okay, an undertaker’s face) Reid asserts three outrageous falsehoods:

1) Republicans supported slavery.
2) Republicans opposed women’s suffrage.
3) Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Act.

The first is too idiotic to refute.  Perhaps Sen. Reid (D-Hinky Land Deals) has forgotten that Abolition was the cause upon which the Republican Party was founded, and that the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, is known today as the Great Emancipator.  Clearly, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” has a moron for a majority leader.  But wait – there’s more!

The history of women’s suffrage in the U.S. is apparently far more complex than Harry “the Horse” Reid’s brain is capable of embracing.  Women already had the right to vote in many states, including Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, before the passage of the 19th Amendment, and it was the former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt, running on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912 against both Taft (who had succeeded him) and the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, that made the right to vote for women part of its platform.  It was the southern states, all controlled at the time by Democrats, which had adamantly opposed ratification each time it was proposed, starting in 1878.  So, for that matter, did the Virginia-born southerner, Wilson, who largely ignored the issue until 1917, when suffragettes picketed the White House and even went on a hunger strike.  In the end, Wilson used the pretext of World War I to get behind the 19th Amendment, which became law in 1919.

But it’s the third assertion that’s really rich, Reid’s implication that it was the evil Republicans who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  In fact, it was the Republicans who pulled President Johnson’s fat out of the fire, voting in greater percentages for passage than the Democrats.  And who, you ask, were among the Democrats who sought, through a prolonged filibuster, to deny African-Americans full participation in American society?  These guys:

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Yes, Racist No. 1 would be Robert Byrd (D-KKK), the longest-serving senator in American history, “the conscience of the Senate,” and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, who a few years ago memorably upchucked the N-word in an interview with the late Tony Snow on Fox News:

Villain No. 2 is the reactionary “Sleepin’ Sam” Ervin of North Carolina, who became a hero to the Left during Watergate, when his folksy Jubilation T. Cornpone accent and his dogged pursuit of Richard Nixon caused Democrats everywhere to forget his shameful role during the filibuster.   For the Nixon-hounding media, Ervin’s central-casting “country lawyer” proved to be the trump card, his racist past whitewashed in the service of the present.

Finally, there is Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., father of Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., and grandfather of Albert Arnold Gore III, progenitor of the Hillbilly Dynasty that latterly has given us Global Warming and, sadly, additions to the police blotter.  Few today remember the senior Gore, the man who announced the birth of his only begotten Nobel Peace Prize Laureate on the front pages of the Tennessee newspapers, but in addition to voting against the Civil Rights Act (a vote, to his credit, he later said he regretted) he was also deeply involved with the communist sympathizer and perhaps KGB spy , Armand Hammer, and his Occidental Petroleum company, the stock in which contributed mightily to the Gore family fortune.  (Along with tobacco, of course, Junior’s other bête noire.)

But perhaps the most depressing thing about this tale told by an idiot is that it signifies something: the media’s complicity in covering up the truth, rather than covering the truth.  And Exhibit A is this story from the Politico.

If you want to know what’s wrong with American journalism, Glenn Thrush’s story is a handy example.  A) it frames the entire issue in the standard charge-countercharge format, b) its context is entirely that of the horse-race, which is the preferred mode of political journalists everywhere, since it saves them the bother of actually checking any of the “facts” (asserted by others, so what the heck) in their articles and, c) it is absolutely devoid of any illumination of the larger issues raised by the dopey and duplicitous Majority Leader.  It also, shamefully, plays into the leftist penchant for unchallenged wholesale historical revisionism.

One of the reasons the press is the only private institution explicitly protected by the Constitution is that it is supposed to act on behalf of the people, keeping those in power both responsible and in check.  Today’s media, however, has almost entirely abandoned that ideal in favor of frank partisanship or, worse, stories like this, that appear to have been written by somebody born yesterday and too lazy to check even the simplest “fact.”   For once, I have to applaud Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who said: “Having made this disgraceful statement on the floor of the United States Senate, Mr. Reid should immediately apologize on the Senate floor to his colleagues, to his constituents, and to the American people. If he is going to stand by these statements, the Democrats must immediately reconsider his fitness to lead them.”

Don’t hold your breath, Mike.  Sen. Reid (D – Dead Man Walking) is nearly a lock to be defeated for re-election next year, when Nevada comes to its senses and even the voters of Vegas decide that Freddo Corleone is just too dumb to be a senator.  Yes, involuntary retirement looms for the Land Deal Mormon, but what does he care?  If he can get this “health care” racket up and off the ground, he’ll be handsomely rewarded by the Chicago Combine, whose avatar currently occupies the White House.

And the media?

Look – over there!  It’s another one of Tiger Woods’ mistresses!


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Posted Dec 8th 2009 at 10:49 am in Congress, Culture, Healthcare, History, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 72 Comments