Harry Reid’s toxic influence on politics -- By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

There are few politicians more cavalier with the truth and more loathsome than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He delighted in telling a bald-faced untruth about Mitt Romney, namely that he did not pay taxes for 10 years. He now says the Koch brothers didn’t pay corporate taxes. He calls the brothers, who provide jobs and legally participate in the American political system, “un-American.” His self-enrichment in Nevada is legendary, and he reportedly has been under investigation in a corruption probe.

In the Senate, he changed 200-plus years of tradition to supposedly break gridlock in the confirmation process (now even Dems won’t approve the president’s embarrassing nominees). But he uses the procedure known as “filling the tree” to prevent amendments. He refuses to bring to a vote the overwhelmingly popular Iran sanctions bill. His only bipartisan instincts seem to be in hurling racial remarks, whether about President Obama or questioning Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s intellect.

Reid forever earned the left’s admiration by jamming through Obamacare on strict party lines using a questionable procedure. Now those who dispute the law’s ill effects are “lying.” Reid survives because for Democrats he is, in FDR’s words, a bastard, but their bastard. Moreover, if the MSM and liberal spinners acknowledged his misdeeds, the entire meme that the Republicans are solely responsible for political dysfunction would crumble. Reid’s venom and procedural machinations, if fully explored and condemned, would certainly correct that misnomer.

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