Harry Reid Has Got To Go

...for the sake of his own Senate caucus, if nothing else.

I first saw this on Hugh Hewitt's site yesterday afternoon. This was, presumeably, after Matt Drudge picked it up:

Dem Senate Leader Harry Reid [NV] called the President 'a loser' today while Bush is representing the country overseas in Europe... MORE... 'I think this guy is a loser. I think President Bush is doing a bad job,' Reid said during a gathering in Vegas...

Matt Margolis quotes RNC Communications Director Brian Jones (who probably can't believe his good fortune at the moment) as follows:

Senator Reid's comments are a sad development but not surprising from the leader of a party devoid of optimism, ideas or solutions to the issues people care about most. The President will continue reaching across party lines to save Social Security, enact an energy policy, grow our economy and support our troops.

Apparently something penetrated the haze of idiocy in which Dirty Harry's head has been impacted for the past few months, and he (sort of) apologized:

After [Brian Jones'] statement was released, Reid phoned the Review-Journal to acknowledge he thought he crossed the line.

"You know the President is in Europe, probably sleeping," Reid said in an interview this afternoon. "But I called (Karl) Rove and apologized for what I said."

In other words, he waited to make this call until he knew that the President was asleep so that he wouldn't have to talk to him directly. I don't know what Rove said in reply - probably not much, since Reid has hung himself out to dry quite nicely - but if I'd have been he, I would have "urged" the Minority Leader to tender that apology to the President personally. If, you know, his remorse was actually sincere.

I'm reminded of the climactic gunfight scene in Back to the Future III, when Marty McFly is trying to sober up Doc Brown inside the saloon and Mad Dog Tannen is calling him out.

Tannen counts (with considerable help) to ten and growls, "Ah said that's ten, you gutless yella pie-slinger!"

McFly looks around the packed saloon slowly and then at the camera and exclaims, "He's an asshole! I don't care what Tannen says, and I don't care what anybody else says, either."

Dubya would never sully his office by responding in any fashion to such a grade school taunt, but you can bet the above wasn't far from what he was thinking.

Besides, as I alluded to above, Reid has already (further) buried himself. It's truly breathtaking, the more I think about it. The highest ranking Democrat in the federal government calls the President of the United States a "loser"?

I mean, not that there's not precedent for this sort of thing - freshly minted House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, referred to then-President and Mrs. Clinton as "counterculture McGoverniks" in late 1994 - but at least Mr. Newt's insult had some relevant context and made sense within it. The Clintons are counterculture McGoverniks; Gingrich was only saying what everybody already knew to be true, but was impolitic to actually publicly point out. Moreover, his utterance of it was a reflection of the political momentum of that time; the wind was at GOP backs, the Republicans were on the upswing, and Newt had reason to exude such confidence.

None of these things are true about Reid's slur. First of all, Bush has yet to lose anything, by my reckoning; he's 2-0 in Texas guberantorial campaigns, 2-0 in presidential campaigns, has expanded Republican congressional seats in the last two election cycles, has won passage of every major legislative initiative he's undertaken, spectacularly won two military campaigns (Afghanistan and Iraq) in the GWOT, and had a vicarious hand in driving Syria out of Lebanon without firing a shot. Second, the context of Reid's insult is as the titular head of a party in decline, with sagging fortunes and a burgeoning extremist insanity that has the whole gaggle on a greased rail toward political suicide.

Frankly, Dirty Harry calling GDub a "loser" strikes me as exactly what the new captain of the SS Titanic would have said about the iceberg ten minutes after hitting it. It's the intemperance of a man handed a pair of deuces in a poker game and told to win back the entire pot. It's the frustration of a pol who took the job already cornered and backed further into it by an incompetence of which he is dimly aware and unable to overcome. It's the rage of somebody in so far over his head that all he has left is lashing out.

You want further context? Remember what the Nevada Donk said earlier in the day (via Captain's Quarters).

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has privately told individual Republicans he doesn't intend to block votes on any Supreme Court nominees except in extreme cases, according to officials familiar with the conversations.

At the same time, Reid has declined in private — as well as in public — to offer the type of firm no-filibuster assurance that might help him prevail over Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-TN in a struggle over President Bush's conservative court appointments and rules covering future confirmations. ...

"I can never say there will never be a filibuster because I cannot say that," he said recently on the Senate floor. "But I don't think this Senate is in the mood for a number of filibusters." [my emphases]

Didja catch that? In essence, Reid is trying to bamboozle the Republicans without actually lying about it. After his side of the aisle has spent the past four years denouncing the President's appellate court picks as "extremists," he tries to "reassure" the majority that oh, heavens to Betsy, NO, he won't filibuster any Bush SCOTUS nominees - except in "extreme" cases.

Does Dirty Harry really think Frist & Co. are that stupid, or is he even dumber than he thinks they are?

You realize, of course, that what Reid should do is unequivocally promise to drop the filibusters, let through "the Bush Seven," and then "change his mind" when the SCOTUS showdown arrives this summer. At this point the overriding priority for the Dems has to be to avert that rule change, and stalling Judges Owen, Brown, Pryor, Pickering, and the others is no longer conducive to that. A prudent and strong leader would recognize when it's time for a strategic retreat, make that call, and make it stick with his "troops."

Heck, it's what Bill Clinton did in 1995, more or less. But Harry Reid trying to impersonate Bill Clinton would be like Barney Fife trying to fill in for Van Diesel in the latest Triple-X movie.

And he knows it.

So he gets mad and calls the President of the United States a "loser."

You could almost feel sorry for the man, if he wasn't engaging in so "extreme" a case of psychological projection.

UPDATE/BUMP TO 5/8: This twit just won't shut up (via Hugh Hewitt)...

[C]onsider this account of Senator Reid's appearance before high school students yesterday:

"Reid took students through a primer of the five most-disputed judicial nominees, arguing some were opposed to the 1973 Roe v. Wade case legalizing abortion. He charged others with trying to dismantle government programs like Social Security.

'I don't want them. I think they're bad people,' Reid said of the nominees.

He described California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, one of the Bush nominees Republicans will probably float first for approval, as an African-American opposed by the Congressional Black Caucus.

'She is a woman who wants to take us back to the Civil War days,' Reid said." [my emphasis]

Double H calls this "appalling" and "simply reprehensible." And it most assuredly is. But what strikes me most about this latest Reid verbal vomit is its incoherence. As in I literally cannot figure out what he's talking about. Is he saying that Judge Brown would seek to rule the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments unconstitutional? Or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? That she would try to reinstitute segregation and Jim Crow laws? Where is he getting this BS?

The answer, I think, is that he wasn't trying to make a substantive critique. He was simply attempting to say the meanest, vilest, nastiest thing about Judge Brown that he could think of, and that's what he came up with. That it made him sound like George Wallace appears to have sailed completely over his hollow head.

Ditto Chucky Schumer, who, after Bob Byrd's slander of Republicans as Hitlerian, and Ken Salazar's sliming of Focus on the Family's James Dobson as "the antiChrist," and Dirty Harry just the day before calling the President a "loser," yesterday made a scolding demand of the Bush White House to "bring moderation" to the Republican side of the filibuster dispute.

On this Sunday evening, I'll let the LORD of Hosts deliver the appropriate benediction:

"He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone..."

UPDATE II: Welcome, Rhymes With Right readers!