“Harry Reid Will Only Do Town Halls By Telephone, Media Mum.”
Given that this is the man of the people who said last December…
“My staff tells me not to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway,” said Reid in his remarks. “In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it’s true.”
…I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by Harry’s decision to further isolate himself from reality.
Update: In the comments below, Andrew M. Garland proposes a Turing-style test named after Reid when constituents call their local politician to determine if he demonstrates a simulacrum of intelligence. Or as in Reid’s case, a less than adequate set of memory chips.
The Turing Test is named after computer theorist Alan Turing. Turing proposed a test for true intelligence in a computer.
In principle, tou would type questions and conversation to either a computer or person at the other end. You would not know which. If you could not reliably tell the difference, then the computer was demonstrating true “intelligence”.
Now we have the Harry Reid Test to determine if you are talking to a person or a computerized collection of recorded talking points. If you communicate by phone with someone identified as “Harry Reid”, and you cannot tell the difference between “Reid” and a bad computer program, then you know you are talking to the live politician.
We note that email responses from politicians have long since been automated by pattern matching, phrase selection, localization, and name substitution within the text. This offers hope for similar automation when responding in voice conversations to constitutents.