Utter Arrogance

Sept. 4, 2009

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada has to be in my top five list of the most arrogant animals in the Congress.
   How Nevadans ever elected such a bad-tempered, ill-mannered piece of work as Reid escapes me.
   What got me lately was how Reid was at a function in Las Vegas and met up with the advertising manager of the Review-Journal who went to shake hands with him.
   “I hope you go out of business,” Reid told the ad manager.
   Now, here’s a newspaper employee who has nothing to do with news, and Reid takes the opportunity to again slash at the throats of anyone who disagrees with him, and in a polite business session in earshot of a dozen or two people.
   “No citizen should expect this kind of behavior from a U.S. senator,” wrote the paper’s publisher Sherman Frederick. “It is certainly not becoming of a man who is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate. And it absolutely is not what anyone would expect from a man who now asks Nevadans to send him back to the Senate for a fifth term.
   “For the sake of all who live and work in Nevada, we can't let this bully behavior pass without calling out Sen. Reid. If he'll try it with the Review-Journal, you can bet that he's tried it with others. So today, we serve notice on Sen. Reid that this creepy tactic will not be tolerated.
   “We won't allow you to bully us. And if you try it with anyone else, count on going through us first.
   “That's a promise, not a threat.
   “And it's a promise to our readers, not to you, Sen. Reid.”
   Already the pundits are betting odds against Reid and a handful of others come next election. For instance, when Rep. Eric Massa of New York said, “I will vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I’m doing is going to help them...I will vote against their opinion if I actually believe it will help them,” most folks think he secured his retirement from the House.
   Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas who called town hall protesters “un-American and disrespectful” and Rep. Brian Baird of Washington said they were “brownshirts” and compared them to Oklahoma bomber Tim McVeigh, are likewise considered bad risks by their insurance companies.
   Because unlike members of Congress, most Americans remember that not only did we get pretty riled up about – you guessed it! – taxes and regulations and such about 250 years ago, we sent Ol’ George a pretty acid-laced letter telling him to go take a long walk on a short pier. When the King got snippy in return, we kicked his butt clean back to his palace.
   So no Congressman holding a town hall meeting calls these people “revolutionaries” like they did back in 1776…therefore, they must be more like King George.
   These reprobates are not only ridiculing and demeaning those who disagree with them, but having their security thugs drag them out of town hall meetings. Now that’s the SS Gestapo, folks.
   Next up on my Top Jerks of the day is Robert Gibbs, the White House press guy. What an arrogant, sniveling, narcissist he is. His smirking brush-offs, his coy party-boy attitude and his blatant insults are pathetic.
   Gibbs shows an obvious preference for the team members of the news media, i.e., those who swallow the propaganda without question, unless they need clarification on some point of glorification. When Gibbs receives a question from real journalists, he turns into “Robert Glib”.
   Perhaps I’m wrong, but in the world where I learned journalism, we report the facts and only the facts on the front page, and editorialize on the opinion page. CNN and its brethren cable networks have lost all semblance of what was once the guiding principle, the absolute marrow of the news business. They might as well come to White House briefings with pom poms instead of note pads and pens.
   And time was when a spokesman who got cocky with a real newshound was plastered in a way that raised welts and blisters when said propaganda minister read it. In the days when men was men and reporters were glad of it, such antics would have found those newsmen sucking up to the politicians ostracized to a broom-closet sized room away from the rest, and the perpetrator of the propaganda taken down a few notches, the hard way.