(Fred Weinberg) – So, Harry Reid has decided not to run for another term in the Senate in 2016.
I know what I am supposed to write. I’m supposed to write a loyal opposition lion in winter piece, praising Reid’s political acumen and supposed contributions to the great state of Nevada.
I cannot.
Because it wouldn’t be true.
Harry Reid may once have actually represented the people of Nevada, but starting when he became the Minority Leader in 2006, he totally forgot where he came from and who he represented.
He became a caricature of everything people hate in politicians and was damn proud of it.
His sycophants in the media marveled at his “political acumen” which is shorthand for ruthlessly screwing people. Worse, despite never having held an actual job where he wasn’t sucking at the public teat, he became rich. How does a man in the House and Senate for over 30 years become rich? Shrewd investing?
When the final book on Reid is written, his career will amount to nothing of much import but a whole lot of ruthlessly screwing people for very shallow political gains. Just the sort of thing most people want to be remembered for, right?
People were afraid to cross him because he could hurt you if your livelihood revolved around politics and government. He was Kevin Spacey’s character in House of Cards without the class, hair and make-up. And Barack Obama—“a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”—wailing that Reid can’t be replaced? He’s right. Who wants to go out and find a Mike Tyson in his early days to carry water for a lame duck President. Even Tyson has grown up.
The Nevada Reidites—and I must admit, I actually endorsed him once, long ago—used to think he was indispensable. That we needed him.
The fact is that Nevada is a donor state despite the fact that the Feds own more than 85 percent of our land mass. Reid’s pork was pathetic in nature and very costly to the taxpayers. But not his family.
He was big on alternative energy—as long as the company involved was represented by one of his sons or someone close to one of his sons—and Nevadans now pay through the nose to NVEnergy for buying such power.
The city of Ely, Nevada, now stands as a stark reminder that Reid is a hyper-partisan pimp.
Back in the day (pre 2007), Ely—a nice little town in eastern Nevada—was going to get two, modern coal-fired power plants located on Federal land—along with a huge number of jobs—which would have powered Las Vegas and a lot of other places in the West. Those wouldn’t have been dirty plants. The technology was very impressive and expensive. And we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. Reid had signed off on those plants.
Then, he became Minority Leader and fell under the spell of Nancy Pelosi and her Envirowacko friends. Coal, bad. Alternative energy, good.
The power plants went away. Ely has a long history of voting Republican.
I defy Harry to walk down Aultman, Avenue in Ely, unescorted. I’d like to own the pay-per-view rights.
In Ely, their fondest hope is that Harry will somehow get caught doing something which violated state law and end up in the Ely State Prison. There would be people volunteering to become guards.
The sum total of Harry Reid is that he was nobody, did not do much and will soon be forgotten just like any other greedy, grasping, pol who may have been a bit more nasty than most but accomplished relatively little of lasting import.
Mr. Weinberg is publisher of the Penny Press. Get to know more about him by visiting www.PennyPresslv.com.
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
RSS