'Harry Reid is the da Vinci of Distraction'

“Harry Reid Slammed By Hometown Paper For ‘Race-Baiting,’” Chuck Ross writes at the Daily Caller:

The trigger for the Review-Journal was a comment Reid made earlier this week after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.

In a 5-4 decision, the Court sided with Hobby Lobby, allowing it and other “closely-held” corporations to skirt the Obamacare mandate that requires companies to provide health insurance plans to their employees that contain coverage for certain contraceptives. Companies like Hobby Lobby can now cite their religious principles in deciding to not provide coverage for those contraceptives.

An angry Reid criticized the decision, saying, “The one thing we are going to do during this work period, sooner rather than later, is to ensure that women’s lives are not determined by the virtues of five white men.”

The issue there is that only four of the justices that sided with Hobby Lobby are white. The fifth justice was Clarence Thomas, who is black.

“Sen. Reid’s slip was no accident,” reads the Review-Journal editorial. “He believes racial and ethnic minorities are ideologically monolithic constituencies who are incapable of independent or — gasp! — right-of-center thinking.”

“In the majority leader’s mind, Mr. Thomas is not an African-American because the justice doesn’t blindly subscribe to liberal orthodoxy,” the paper wrote, before pointing out other examples of Reid compartmentalizing minorities.

During his 2010 re-election campaign, Reid said of Latino voters, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK? Do I need to say more?”

As the editorial points out, Nevada’s Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, is Hispanic.