Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Harry Reid, Inkblot

Much has been said about Harry Reid, current speaker of the house. Up until recently the rap on the right has been that Reid is colorless, AND he's an Al-Quaeda member who hates the troops and wants to harm them by taking them out of the war zone and putting them in, you know, America. He's ruining this country with his librul schemes AND in charge of the most moribund, do-nothing congress ever.

You notice anything contradictory in that last paragraph?

This column is occasioned by a discussion I'm having at WAMK concerning the whole Harry Reid/Rush Limbaugh dustup. Watch this and tell me - is Reid trying to take credit for the idea of auctioning the letter, or acknowleging that Rush did some good with it himself?

As I said, you can see him taking credit for the idea if you really really want to, the same way that you can see Christ's face in tortilla if you really really want to. The weird thing is, the discussion over this tiny sideshow in the politcal theatre has been going on for DAYS.

How can a guy with so little personality inspire this kind of anger?

I'll tell you how. Harry Reid isn't a man, he's a strategy. The Democrat Party, long underground, had time to observe their enemy and plan how they would trip them up when they regained power. Knowing that whomever was in charge would be lightning rods, they chose a frail granny (Nancy Pelosi) and a colorless beaurocrat (Reid), because attacking these two creates a great picture. By vilifying them, the right looks like the kid at school who used to beat you up for your lunch money.

For that matter, it was brilliant to get the right on the side of the debate AGAINST providing medical care for poor children. Masterstroke.

Harry is so much a tabula rasa, so faceless, that the right is punching itself in its own face whenever they take a swing at him. And because they are slow to learn, the right continutes to attack the Majority Leader like a gale force wind attacks a mighty oak. What they don't recognize is that he is, in fact, a Reid.

(Full disclosure: strategy HAH! I wish the Democrats could be that Machiavellian! Truth is, Reid is probably up there through sheer dumb luck. I'll put it this way - if there is another Democratic sweep in 2008, I don't think it will be because people love Democrats.)

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