Regrets, former Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has a few.
The retired Democratic leader says he wishes “every day” for a president like George W. Bush. Yes, the man who once declared America’s 43rd commander in the “worst president” in U.S. history now pines for the halcyon days of the Bush years, back when we were all so young and innocent.
The moment occurred after Reid was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether he has anything positive to say about President Trump.
“I just have trouble accepting him as a person, so frankly I don’t see anything he’s doing right,” the former senator said during the interview.
Bash then reminded Reid that he once said that George W. Bush was the “worst president we’ve ever had.”
“He and I had our differences, but no one ever questioned his patriotism. Our battles were strictly political battles,” Reid responded.
Oh, please. This is a lie, which is about par for the course for the man who claimed falsely in 2012 that the GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, was a tax dodge. Reid admitted later that he fabricated the story.
During Bush’s two terms in office, Reid regularly railed against the GOP president in personal and demeaning terms, calling him a “loser” and a “liar.” Reid even told Bush to his face that his dog was “fat.” Reid once reportedly said in reference to Bush that he was “mystified, dumbfounded about how difficult it is to work with this guy,” according to the New York Times. The former senator also said in 2007: “I fear that the Bush years will be known as a rare, even dark time.”
But now that Trump is in office, well, Reid has nothing but respect for his former president.
“There’s no question in my mind that George Bush would be Babe Ruth in this league that he’s in with Donald Trump in the league. Donald Trump wouldn’t make the team,” the senator told Bash.
Uh-huh. Let’s move on from the lie that Reid kept it professional when he opposed 43 and consider the possibility that the former senator has merely had a change of heart regarding how he feels about Bush. Again, I say, “uh-huh.”
I’d probably be more inclined to believe Reid has evolved on the matter were it not for the fact that people like him do this all the time, claiming they respect and admire Republicans who no longer threaten the Democratic Party’s relentless pursuit of power. It’s like a lazy, lame-brained version of “the only good Republican is a dead Republican” cliché.
Democrats tend to have one setting when it comes to opposing powerful GOP candidates and lawmakers, and it’s to scream non-stop about how that Republican is absolutely the worst person in history. It’s only after the Republican exits office or drops out of the race that Democrats (sometimes) tone it down a notch, claiming later that their opposition was based on professional disagreements and mutual respect the whole way. The problem with these attempts at historical revisionism is that some of us have decent memories.
Some of us have good enough memories to notice that Democrats tend to treat all threatening Republicans with the same level invective, which is probably why GOP and independent voters tuned out the Left’s repeated attacks against Trump in 2016. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t heard before.
