Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Can't Take the Heat

Let us hope that with his popularity in the toilet that Harry Reid is headed towards defeat in November 2010.  It is still a long way off but there are several interesting things to report about how he is doing in his home state of Nevada:

On Wednesday, before he addressed a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Reid joined the chamber’s board members for a meet-’n'-greet and a photo. One of the last in line was the Review-Journal’s director of advertising, Bob Brown, a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers. He has nothing to do with news coverage or the opinion pages of the Review-Journal.

Yet, as Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: “I hope you go out of business.”

Mr. Popularity he's not.

Why would Sen. Reid say such a thing?  Maybe because the Review Journal has been running stories about how unpopular he is in his own state.  This is, after all, news as Harry Reid is the Senate Majority Leader for the Democrats.

Reid’s statement is all the more ironic in light of his past statements (when a Republican was running the White House) about trying to scare people, not releasing information, covering up the facts, etc…  Seems as though those principles don’t apply when his own skin is on the line for re-election.

The piece continues:

No citizen should expect this kind of behavior from a U.S. senator. 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.

If he thinks he can push the state’s largest newspaper around by exacting some kind of economic punishment in retaliation for not seeing eye to eye with him on matters of politics, I can only imagine how he pressures businesses and individuals who don’t have the wherewithal of the Review-Journal.

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.

This is the man who proudly announced that he had not read any of the papers of Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor when she was undergoing the confirmation process:

“I understand that during her career, she’s written hundreds and hundreds of opinions. I haven’t read a single one of them, and if I’m fortunate before we end this, I won’t have to read one of them,” the majority leader told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday.

But on the other hand, when Supreme Court Justice John Roberts was undergoing the same process Reid said this:

No one suggests that John Roberts was motivated by bigotry or animosity toward minorities or women, … But these memos lead one to question whether he truly appreciated the history of the civil rights struggle. He wrote about discrimination as an abstract concept, not as a flesh and blood reality for countless of his fellow citizens.

Sounds to me like the partisan hack is striking back with threats because he thinks he might lose his next election and the very same tactics he condemned he now favors.

Is this the kind of person we want in Washington?