http://www.watchdogwag.com/?p=1080

New Series Begins: Why Would Anyone Vote for Senator Harry Reid?

Posted by Mike Zahara on Aug 30, 2009

A multi-part series chronicling Senator Harry Reid of Nevada at the twilight of his career and facing near certain defeat in 2010
41 years of public life in Nevada and nothing to show for it.

That’s what history will recall about whom I dubbed Senator Cipher in 2005:

ci·pher also cy·pher
n.
1. The mathematical symbol (0) denoting absence of quantity; zero.
2. An Arabic numeral or figure; a number.
3. One having no influence or value; a nonentity.

An entire lifetime of public service, having never held a job in the private sector, also becoming a multi-millionaire along the way via shady land deals, all to get to the achievement he holds today and still, Nevada has nothing to be grateful for or thankful about his ‘service’ to us more than four decades later.
I’m always surprised when a business person or the political classes in Nevada tell me, ‘Oh, what would we do without Harry Reid?’
And I think to myself, ‘are your standards really that low; tell me, what has Harry Reid ever done for Nevada?’ Have they forgotten that Nevada has produced true powerhouse senators like Pat McCarran, Howard Cannon, or Paul Laxalt who had actual achievements and in comparison to Harry Reid, make him look Busch League, rather than Big League?

There is no ‘there’ there with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and there never was.

I was going to wait until late this year to begin this series about the inconsequential life of Senator Harry Reid, but with the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy, we’ll begin it a bit early and try to cover all of the bases as we continue this series through next year’s election.

In my Kennedy piece on August 26, 2009 referring to Harry Reid, I wrote: ‘The contrast between the two senators is as brutally stark as it gets.’
If you’re from the Democratic Party’s liberal or progressive wings, I can’t see how anything in this man’s entire career has earned your vote, much less your respect. Moderate to conservative members have just slightly more meat on the bone, but as a moderate, I can’t find any compelling reason to cast a vote for this man either, and neither can most people that I know; Senator Harry Reid has lost almost everybody I know personally, professionally, and politically.

If the Republicans fail to put up a credible candidate, I’ll simply skip voting the office. This is the same view I’m hearing from more than 50% of my own party’s voters, and the other 50% have no enthusiasm for him at all.

And you’re reading this from a 30 year veteran partisan Democrat who has sat in leadership positions around the country and who is inclined to forgive sins and sinners within my own party if there’s something of value that I can take to the bank.

The bank is closed however; there was a run on its voters’ goodwill in Nevada toward Senator Harry Reid long ago.

What’s left for Senator Harry Reid is core group of some elderly people, some Gaming and Labor executives, and the people completely dependent on him for his campaign and appropriations largesse.

Regular people with regular problems left Harry Reid and aren’t coming back. He’s never cared about them, so why should they vote for him? I’ve traveled the state in recent months speaking with regular voters and my sense is that Senator Harry Reid will lose badly, and be a substantial drag on the entire Democratic ticket in 2010.
There were some locales where I couldn’t find a single person willing to cast a vote for him, and I was speaking with registered Democrats!

The 41 year look back is cold, barren, and empty. There is so little to show for all these years that it’s sad, bordering on politically pathetic. As I’ve researched this out over that last two years, the recurring theme is that Harry Reid has never had core political principles, any moral compass, any hallmark legislation, or any core beliefs that ever defined him.

Senator Cipher, indeed!

His ambition has never known any boundaries and he set off on getting as much for himself and his family as he could get his hands on. Stepping on anyone and everyone in his way, he was even so bold as to convert himself and his wife to LDS to achieve his goals. Said one LDS Elder to me, ‘He’s never been one of us.’
That’s very interesting to me because he’s never been one of us either.

We’ll look at labor, the environment, civil and voting rights, womens’ rights, gay rights, families issues, mining, ranching, water, transportation, growth, and many other issues where he has often been on the polar opposite side of conventional Democratic Party positions and policies his entire public life.

I couldn’t even call him a Republican or affix any kind of label to him because he is completely absent anything that would define who he is fundamentally as a man.
I’m puzzled by how someone could be around so long and be so empty-handed this late in the game as his career is coming to an unceremonious ending.
On the biggest issues of the day throughout his 41 years, he has never taken a stand on anything except Yucca Mountain. It’s not a ‘whichever way the wind is blowing’ political philosophy either; there is no bedrock to him, no foundation, nothing of value because he has no values,that voters could reflect upon and draw conclusions either positively or negatively.

Because of that, you have to assess what isn’t as well as what could have and should have been with Senator Harry Reid and Nevada.

I still don’t think he understands the enormous power he has today as SML; he could have loaded up the gravy train for Nevada—each and every one in that position had done so for their home states—and at least we would have something; late in the game, but at least something besides being ranked #50 of 50 consistently in almost everything.

The position of majority leader began in 1913 and was formalized in both parties in 1920, and without question, Senator Harry Reid ranks dead last in either party in this position; no one in the history of the position has had less to show for it than Harry Reid does.

History will not be kind, but I will try to be kinder to him; I almost feel sorry for such a vacant, vacuous, vessel of a man. I wasn’t kidding when I also said in the Kennedy piece that Senator Harry Reid will be forgotten a week after his passing, and although that was an unkind truth, again, he’s earned that all by himself.

Had he asked me, I would have advised him to retire out on top and close out his public life to save the grand illusion he’s created about himself that has no basis in fact or reality.

History is written by history’s winners and all of the campaign donations and fluffy campaign rhetoric, or conversely, the outright threatening all of us as to what will happen without his winning re-election, can’t change the fact that Senator Harry Reid won’t be writing his own epitaph.

Part one is coming up this fall.

Mike Zahara
08302009
www.WatchDogWag.com

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/ted-kennedy-soviet-union-ronald-reagan-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html

Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit

Peter Robinson, 08.28.09, 12:01 AM ET
Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.

Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people,” the memorandum explained, “[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy’s motives.

“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”

Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov–the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–at least in part to advance his own political prospects.

In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.”

“The document,” Kengor continues, “has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I’ve ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy’s office did not deny it.”

Why bring all this up now? No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum–within eight months, the Soviet leader would be dead–and now that Kennedy himself has died even many of the former senator’s opponents find themselves grieving. Yet precisely because Kennedy represented such a commanding figure–perhaps the most compelling liberal of our day–we need to consider his record in full.

Doing so, it turns out, requires pondering a document in the archives of the politburo.

When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.

Peter Robinson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former White House speechwriter, writes a weekly column for Forbes.

THE DEMOCRATS’ PERNICIOUS HEALTH HOAX

John F. Gaski, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame , IN 46556
(574) 631-5266
jgaski@nd.edu

By now the realization should be taking hold that the Democrats’ health care plan has been exposed as a hoax.  And it was the Democrats themselves who discredited and exposed it, but in a very ironic way.  Of course, you won’t hear this bombshell news reported by Democrat partisans Katie Couric, Charles Gibson, and Brian Williams.

As for the substance, remember the Democrats’ original rationale for their national health care takeover scheme?  They wanted all uninsured Americans to be covered, right?  Remember?  But now they concede that their mega-upheaval of a plan would still leave about 15 million without medical insurance.  Yet they still advocate the plan!  Why?

First, a digression:  Don’t believe that “47 million uninsured” number.  That canard is beyond a hoax.  It is a fraud and a lie.  For example, it includes at least 10 million illegal aliens (yes, that is the right term for those who enter our country by violating American law) and another five million or so legal foreign residents.  Those categories are not “uninsured Americans” because they are not Americans.  The notorious 47M also includes millions of wealthy people who do not purchase medical insurance—rendering themselves self-insured, not uninsured.  The biggest deceptions of all may be counting a large cohort of the young and vigorous who make the rational cost/benefit decision not to buy medical insurance yet, and several million others who qualify for free insurance and just don’t bother to sign up!  Bottom line, subtract out the un-uninsured and other inapplicable categories and the true number of Americans without health insurance is somewhere around seven million, maybe ten conservatively (compared with 15 million after Democrat “reform”?).  Google the issue for about ten minutes to verify.

Another way the Democrats inadvertently reveal their own national health insurance dishonesty is through infidelity to a second objective, cost control.  Remember that one?  They are hoping you don’t, especially since the Congressional Budget Office has reported that the Obama-Democrat scheme would add $1 trillion to the national health tab over the next decade.  Yet the Dems still want their plan.  Why?

Why, indeed?  It must be something else, therefore.  If their own action undermines their stated aims, and still they desperately favor the action, then the Democrats’ real purpose must be something different, something they will not reveal.  But what?  Simple:

Have you noticed how the Washington Democrats like to take control of things, particularly big things in the economy such as the major banks and the auto industry, as well as health care?  (Barack Obama has realized that he doesn’t have to literally own the banks to control them.  He can, instead, achiev e control through bank dependence on TARP money and through his own coercion and intimidation.  Step out of line, that is, and a bank will be publicly vilified by Barney Frank and other operatives, and maybe even have its executives prosecuted.) When American business, American jobs, and the American people become totally dependent on Barack Obama and the Democrats for money and credit, including student loans for good measure, how much power will that give the Obama Democrats over our country?  The portrait coming into focus is one of either totalitarian socialism or an unholy socialist hybrid with fascism.

And when you are dependent on the decision of a Democrat bureaucrat for crucial medical treatment, how much power does that give the Democrats over you?  (Do you suppose party registration or political contributions might enter the bureaucrat’s calculus?  Recall how, in the GM reorganization, the Dems axed profitable dealers who were known to be Republican.)  When the Democrats achieve literal death-grip power over the lives of all our people, that is when they also achieve their long-cherished dream of absolute power and a Democrat dictatorship.  Dictatorship in a virtual one-party state is the correct forecast because our present rulers can never be voted out of national power after they grant amnesty to the millions of illegal aliens, who would promptly be registered as mostly Democrat voters by Acorn!  Now do you see what the real scheme is?  Now does it all make sense? This is not your father’s Democrat party.

This is also not about health care, ultimately.  It is about raw political power and the long-promised socialist takeover of the United States .  (Note:  I cannot prove that President Obama is a socialist and I cannot prove he is a communist, but it is easy to prove that he is one or the other.  You could do that for yourself.  Ready?  When in the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama’s voting record was to the left of Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the one admitted socialist in that body—who naturally gravitates to the Democrats, for some reason.  If Barack Obama is further to the left than Senator Sanders politically, then he is either a more extreme socialist or something even more radical left.  Q.E.D.)

No public option, they now suggest?  Don’t believe it.  They’ll create a public option, soon to become the only option, by stealth—a kind of Fannie-Freddie co-op, because government control, in this case medical dictatorship, is an article of theology for the lib Dems.

We do not have a health care crisis in this country—because everyone already gets health care.  It is just that some rely on the emergency room as their private medical services provider, so the system is inefficient and definitely too expensive overall.  We do have a health insurance problem, and a health care cost crisis, but not a national health care crisis.  And both real problems are readily manageable if the Dems would only allow it. We need to permit and foster interstate insurance competition, medical savings accounts, and tort reform to help reduce costs, and tax credits for health insurance purchase to expand coverage—from about 98% of the population, in reality, to closer to 100%.  Those numbers also help punctuate, and puncture, the true nature of the liberal Democrats’ health hoax.

*          *          *

Incidentally, or not, despite the Democrats’ fumbling o f this whole issue, the Republicans are succumbing to their opponents’ red herring, straw man, jiu-jitsu diversionary misdirection on the “death panels” matter.  It is not those prospective end-of-life counseling “services” that are the real death panels, although that is a fair term for them.  The real Democrat death panels would be the thousands of politically-appointed bureaucrats wielding life-and-death power over our citizenry through their decisions concerning whether to bestow or withhold life-saving treatment.  Again, can you foresee a time when the Washington Democrats will let it leak that you are more likely to be approved, and saved, if you have a record of contributing to Democrat candidates?  The Democrats play politics with everything else, don’t they?  If you haven’t thought of this, the Dems sure have.
0A

*          *          *

This is it, America .  This isn’t really about a health policy issue; it is about the survival, or takeover, of our nation.  If the Dems succeed in cramming their bitter medicine, actually poison, down your throat, the country is finished.  It is the town hall protestors who seem to sense this most clearly.  I hope the preceding diagnosis and prognosis help, too.

The author, a recognized authority on the nature and sources of social and political power, has been a registered Democrat for over 20 years. He is also author of the recently published Frugal Cool:  How to Get Rich—Without Making Very Much Money (Corby Books, 2009).

http://www.pressandguide.com/stories/082609/loc_20090826018.shtml

Voters in South Dakota sent the last Democrat Leader of the Senate packing when he lost touch with his constituents …Tom Daschle…and now the voters of Nevada have a chance to send home another out of touch Democrat Leader of the Senate, Harry Reid.

Unfortunately President Obama isn’t up for re-election for 4 years.  But you can send a message to Obama and the Democrats:  if this is the change you were talking about, you can keep the change.  Nothing would send a stronger message to Obama than taking out his quaterback in the U.S. Senate.

Senator Harry Reid has been President Obama’s point man in Congress. He tells the citizens of Nevada one thing and then manipulates his votes and power for the liberal Democrats’ agenda…not Nevada’s.

*           Harry Reid supported government bailouts of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. His donors did just fine, while his constituents are stuck paying the bill.

*           Reid is pushing socialized healthcare, while Canada and other countries who’ve tried it are learning from their mistake. But we don’t want Reid’s rationing and “end of life” planning.

*           Reid’s hypocrisy appears endless. He tells the voters of Nevada he supports the 2nd Amendment, and then he allows the Senate to pass gun control laws. He says he’s “pro-life” and then he allows the Senate to fund and pass laws that encourage abortion.

Please join us today at www.DumpReid.com Reid says he an “independent” who represents Nevada, but he votes with Kennedy and Pelosi – more in line with San Francisco and Massachusetts. Harry Reid is leading the charge on “card check”, the carbon energy tax and nationalizing healthcare.

His policies are dangerous and voters in Nevada are on to him – and polls show he’s behind in his bid for re-election. We need to help Nevada out in getting Reid out. Like Daschle, Reid will have a war chest of over $25 million at his disposal.  He’s funded by Washington insiders, Wall Street bailout barons and Obama’s community organizers. 

As liberal special interest swarm Capitol Hill to feed at the trough of taxpayer dollars, it’s Harry Reid that they know they can count on.
 Click Here to Help Dump Harry Reid! Harry Reid is wrong for Nevada and he’s wrong for America. So lets “Daschle” Reid and send America and the liberals a message… “we the people” have the last word.

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