It’s more effective to compare Harry Reid to “Godfather II’s” Sen Pat Geary than to claim he’s a pederast. It takes some wit to do that, however…

I used to find Richard Cohen to be the most infuriating of knee-jerk liberal columnists, until the Washington Post added writers like Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne who make Cohen seem fair and balanced by comparison. And he, unlike them, also is occasionally capable of a noble bi-partisan moment, such as today’s column calling Harry Reid what he is for his Mitt Romney smear, claiming that an anonymous source from Bain Capital told him that Mitt Romney was a tax cheat.

This, sad little right-wing warriors, is how dirty politicians like Reid get their just desserts, not by mass name-calling and scrawling “Harry Reid is a poo-poo head” on your blogs. Pundits and other prominent voices on Reid’s own side don’t want to associate with him, and suddenly exhibit rare candor and honesty. A liberal writer like Cohen wounds Reid more than a million vindictive posts about his fictional pederasty. This is the system working properly, as it occasionally does. What a shame for conservatives that so many of their number exposed themselves as enthusiastic gutter-dwellers because they wouldn’t wait for a truth-telling liberal like Cohen to get to his keyboard.

Some highlights of Cohen’s terrific take-down of the Senate Majority Leader, nicely titled, “Harry Reid’s Gutter Politics”..

• “In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.”

• “Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not.”

• “He contributes to bad feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done for political advantage.”

• “He is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid.”

• “…Reid has managed to draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.”

• “As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.”

That’s showing how it’s done, Mr. Cohen.

Bravo.

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Source: Richard Cohen