by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, OBAMA
I’ve been pondering the recent Harry Reid episode, where Harry Reid discussed the incident from 2012 when he openly lied about Mitt Romney not filing tax returns for 10 years. Harry Reid completely justified his behavior by stating to CNN’s Dana Bash, “”I don’t regret that at all. Romney didn’t win did he?”
How utterly different would the story be if a Republican Senator had lied in this fashion? It is absolutely incredible that Harry Reid wasn’t called out for his shameful lies. What’s more, when Romney did release his taxes shortly thereafter, disproving Harry Reid, no one issued any retraction for the blatant falsehoods.
Reid egregiously lied about the matter on three separate occasions during the 2012 Presidential election season. First, he stated in July of 2012, that Romney “didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. Now do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain, but obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?”
A few days later, he spoke on the floor of the Senate, saying, “”If a person coming before this body wanted to be a Cabinet officer, he couldn’t be if he had the same refusal Mitt Romney does about tax returns. So the word is out that he has not paid any taxes for 10 years. Let him prove he has paid taxes, because he has not.”
And shortly thereafter, he referred to a unnamed, “extremely credible source” who told Reid that Romney had not paid his taxes for a decade.
This was no offhanded remark. It was a deliberate, intentional, conscious campaign to speak falsely about Mitt Romney in an effort to discredit him.
What could be considered more of an outright criminal activity than a Senator who chose to willfully lie in an attempt to influence a federal election? For someone in his position in the United States Congress, his action is an outrage. Where is the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission when you need them!
It’s equally distressing to consider that so many people heard Harry Reid’s accusations and just blindly accepted it. It speaks to their own bias that when they found out they had been lied to, no one was really infuriated that they were openly, blatantly manipulated.
For people to know that Harry Reid is a cheat and a liar, and yet accept his actions because the ends justified the means — what does this say about their integrity? About the credibility of this country? Have we become so cynical that we just accept this level of lying now as “politics as usual?” How can anyone actually be okay with any person, even and especially a US Senator, outright lying in order to manipulate the outcome of an election?
by | ARTICLES, BUSINESS, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, TAXES
Yesterday the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, painted a picture of class warfare, claiming his side does not have any billionaires.
“The decisions by the Supreme Court have left the American people with the status quo in which one side’s billionaires are pitted against the other side’s billionaires,” he said this morning on the Senate floor. “Except one side doesn’t have any billionaires.”
Here’s the video:
Seems Harry Reid conveniently forgets:
George Soros
Tom Steyer
Ann Cox Chambers
Irwin Jacobs
Ron Burkle
Marc Benioff
Penny Pritzker
James Simons
David Shaw
Jon Stryker
Haim Saban
Who are we missing? Fill in the comments section below!
by | ARTICLES, FREEDOM, SOCIAL SECURITY
It is a national tragedy that people may be willing to put aside the issue of Social Security reform because Congressional Leaders on the Democrat side – such as Dick Durbin and Harry Reid – have been standing behind the position that Social Security is not a problem. While discussing the impending “fiscal cliff” negotiations last week, Harry Reid proclaimed (yet again), that
“Social Security is not part of the problem, That’s one of the myths the Republicans have tried to create,” he said. “Social Security is sound for the next many years.
Reid justifies this outrageous and distorted view by asserting that Social Security is not adding to the current deficit since the the cash in and out is roughly the same. While that may technically true, it is technically true only in the sense that it is analogous to an individual who is running up millions in credit every day — and then that person says that since he doesn’t have to pay it back right away till next year or the year after, it doesn’t affect his immediate budget.
The fallacy of this logic is that although the Social Security cash in may be equal to the cash out, the cash in includes everything we are getting, while the cash out doesn’t include the responsibilities due to come. The cash out formula they are referring to excludes the trillions that are being promised to existing workers in the future while their Social Security tax is being collected today. As the years go by we are continuing to incur the deep cost of future payment obligations that the Democrats are conveniently not accounting for – and it’s going to get impossible to pay those bills when they come due. Yet, those obligations are every bit as real as charges on a credit card.
Equally disturbing is the fact that the media is complicit in promoting this fable. Each year that that passes without fixing the system creates trillions of additional deficit to be paid by our children and grandchildren. Our media is feeding the Democrats’ incompetence by promoting their sham and failing to report the truth about the insolvency of Social Security.
(crossposted at redstate.com/alanjoelny)
by | SOCIAL SECURITY, TAXES
Could it be that the Senate Majority Leader is so clueless with respect to Social Security that he believes it is a solvent program? Harry Reid recently reiterated the claim he made last year on Meet the Press: that we are not in a crisis in Social Security, that Social Security is fully funded for the next forty years, and that the arithmetic works. What’s worse, this man had the audacity to suggest that the problem of Social Security was merely fiction — perpetuated by people who do not like government!
The facts: Social Security is underfunded to the tune of $ 7.7 trillion, and it’s getting worse every day. Had any private company or organization operated in such an underfunded way, its principal would have been charged criminally.
Clearly, we cannot have rational discourse over matters as serious as Social Security if the Senate Majority Leader does not care to realize that the program is in an absolute calamitous state. It’s difficult to imagine that he would intentionally try to dupe the moderator with his flim-flam. The only plausible explanation is that Harry Reid is so intellectually challenged that he doesn’t understand the issue himself.
Anything short of his resignation says something about the fact that politics trumps rational analysis in our political system. That Reid is allowed to speak such buffoonery and not be excoriated by anyone, or even that such a person can get to this political level and be so flagrantly incompetent is very disconcerting. I am staggered by the fact that his comments are not the headlines of all the major newspapers.
