So now we learn that back in 2008, Harry Reid told someone in private that even though Barack Obama might be black, he did not have a “Negro dialect” and he was “light skinned.” The apparent implication was that Obama could therefore be elected.
What are we to make of this? That Reid is a racist? Almost surely not. Just that his word choice again demonstrates the sensitivity of a brick.
Once, when I was writing a column mentioning the Senate majority leader, I found myself writing “Homer Reid,” immediately caught the mistake, asked myself why I made it, and realized it was because I had momentarily confused him in my mind with Homer Simpson, the affable, bumbling cartoon character seen on TV.
It’s almost as if good, old Homer leaped from the TV screen, got himself elected to the Senate and just happened to be exactly what the Democrats wanted in a leader.
Get Homer Simpson in this job, and next thing you know he’ll be saying tea party protesters are “evil mongers,” that you can “smell” Washington tourists in the summer, that the Iraq war “is lost,” that he “can’t stand John McCain,” that George W. Bush is “a loser,” that Ted Kennedy’s death is “going to help” the Democrats and that former Federal Reserve boss Alan Greenspan was a “political hack,” along with some of the other notable Reid gaffes I found on an Internet reminder list.
If Homer were the big cheese in the Senate at this moment, it’s easy to imagine his falling in love with a health bill that could help ruin the country economically, that would make it that much more the sort of welfare state much of Western Europe is trying to escape and that would accomplish virtually nothing it promises.
Republicans have caught on to this charade? Why then, Homer, why don’t you stand up in the Senate and give a speech saying they’re just like those 19th century Southerners who wanted to preserve slavery of blacks? No difference. None. Same thing.
Republicans have caught on to this charade? Why then, Homer, why don’t you stand up in the Senate and give a speech saying they’re just like those 19th century Southerners who wanted to preserve slavery of blacks? No difference. None. Same thing.
Want more of analysis of this stripe? Well, Senate Majority Leader Simpson will say, opposing this bill is like opposing giving women the vote. So there!
We viewers tend to forgive Homer his trespasses because we’re aware he seldom quite gets it, and so if he decides to buy votes in service of this health bill monstrosity, the country may forgive the corruption. And after all, it’s not the first time we’ve had morally barren leaders who just got through pretending to be morally superior.
Enough, Homer and Harry. Go away. Leave us alone.
Homer, you get back into cartoon fiction and stay there, and Harry, well, we know where he is headed this fall — very likely to electoral defeat at the hands of Nevada voters who seem to have caught on to him. Those who tell posters they approve of him add up to 32 percent of the population, while those who say they disapprove come to 52 percent. Likely opponents score better.
And oh, even if Reid’s Obama remarks weren’t racist — that they were seems a stretch to me — his remarks some years back calling Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “an embarrassment” and saying his opinions are “poorly written” may be a different story, especially since some of us think Thomas is extraordinarily lucid in his prose. A couple of commentators I’ve run across have wondered whether Reid wasn’t engaging in a stereotype — you know, the kind that says those folks aren’t usually all that literate.
I think that’s just possibly the case.
