Harry Reid's Top 25 Verbal Faux Pas

Harry Reid has promised — er, threatened — to continue babbling incoherently about Donald Trump and his political team “all the way into retirement.” In an interview with Politico Monday morning, Reid said that he will give a speech about Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and former executive at Breitbart, on Tuesday:

On Sunday, Reid’s spokesman Adam Jentleson said Bannon’s elevation “signals that white supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump’s White House.” Reid said on Monday that he’s got more to say on Bannon.

“I’ve already issued a statement last night. I’m going to say something on the floor tomorrow,” Reid said.

Uh oh. Remember the last time “Dingy Harry” decided to go on a one-man jihad against a private citizen?

The year was 2014, and the Senate was in danger of falling into Republican hands in the off-year election. Then-Majority Leader Reid thought a good strategy for preventing this calamity would be to rail against the Koch brothers on the Senate floor. Reid began to drop one embarrassing rant after another, an almost-daily two minutes of hate against the billionaire businessmen.

Who can forget Reid’s pathetic pun — that the GOP was “addicted to Koch”?

“Republican Senators have come to the floor to defend the Koch brothers’ attempt to buy our democracy,” Dingy Harry wheezed reading from his script. “Not only have Senate Republicans come to the floor to defend the Koch brothers personally, they have again and again defended the Koch brother’s radical agenda.”

Dingy emphasized that the Koch brothers are radical, “from a middle class perspective” but neglected to name the radical, anti-middle class actions they were engaging in.

“Senate Republicans are addicted to Koch,” Dingy concluded. Get it?

Koch is pronounced “coke” – like the drug. Good one, Harry.

Anyone who has followed Harry Reid’s career knows that he is prone to outbursts of obnoxious, offensive verbal diarrhea. And he’s never funny — his outbursts are uniformly nasty and mortifying.

Here’s a list of some of his most atrocious statements throughout the years:

1. In March of 2013, Reid shamelessly politicized the horrific accident that killed eight Marines in Nevada. Reid had suggested that the training accident was caused by “sequester” cuts, infuriating Marine Corps officials. A Marine Corps official told reporter Jim Miklaszewski at NBC that he considered Dingy’s words to be “nothing but pure political posturing on the backs of these fallen Marines.”

2. Reid called President Bush “a liar who betrayed Nevada and betrayed the country” in December 2004.

3. Reid called President Bush a “loser” to a captive audience of high school kids in a civics class a few months after Bush’s second inauguration in 2005.

4. In April 2007, Reid declared the Iraq War to be lost before the surge was even fully operational, demoralizing troops on the ground. Our brave troops would go on to win the war (until Obama withdrew all the troops, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory), proving Dingy’s eulogy to be devastatingly premature.

5. In 2012, Reid told the Huffington Post that Romney’s “poor father must be so embarrassed about his son.” Reid then went on to claim — while providing zero evidence — that Romney went a decade without paying any taxes.

6. Reid continued with his verbal antics about Romney’s taxes on the Senate floor, saying: “The word’s out that (Romney) hasn’t paid any taxes for ten years. Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”

Well, the word was only out because Reid had made it up. Mitt Romney would go on to release enough of his taxes to prove that he had been paying them for the past ten years, demonstrating once again that Dingy Harry is a contemptible liar.

7. In a 2015 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Reid not only refused to apologize for making the bogus claim, he defended it as having been a good tactic: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

8. In August of 2009, he called tea partiers “evil-mongers.”

9. Reid said he was happy about the new Capitol Visitor Center because it meant he wouldn’t have to “smell the tourists” filling up the Capitol in the summer: “In the summertime, because (of) the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol.”

10. Reid declared to the Reno Gazette-Journal in September of 2009 that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death was “going to help” Democrats pass Obamacare.

11. Reid declared that the much reviled Obamacare law was “The Most Important Thing We’ve Done For The Country And The World.”

12. In March of 2010, he cheerfully announced: “Today is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good.”

13. He threatened the Las Vegas Journal’s director of advertising at a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon. While shaking his hand, he said: “I hope you go out of business.”

14. He described candidate Barack Obama as “light-skinned,” with “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”

15. He made this nasty and unsubstantiated comment about Clarance Thomas in 2004: “I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I just don’t think that he’s done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.”

16. He told a Las Vegas Review reporter in August of 2008: “You Know, Joe, I can’t stand John McCain.”

17. Reid insulted former Majority Leader Bill Frist in November 2003: “I’ve never seen such amateurish leadership.”

18. In June 2007, Reid called General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “incompetent.”

19. In March 2005, he called Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Board chairman, “one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington.”

20. In July 2008, Reid told a reporter she should “watch the [Senate] floor more often. … You might learn something.’ … Reid asked the reporter if she ‘spoke English.’ ‘Turn up your Miracle Ear,’ Reid added.”

21. Reid called his Republican colleagues Bush’s “49 puppets he has here in the Senate.”

22. Reid called Senator John McCain an “Old” “Snake Oil” salesman: “But John McCain has a vision too, which in fairness I must address. When doctors screen out the quack nostrums and phony remedies we call snake oil, they use two fundamental principles: the maxim ‘first, do no harm’ and the question ‘is it safe and effective?’ In Congress, as in medicine, when we are offered snake oil as a remedy for the nation’s energy ills … kindly old Doc McCain would like to sell it to you anyway.”

23. In May 0f 2013, Reid compared the Tea Party to anarchists.

24. In November of 2013, Reid said this about complaints from Americans who lost insurance coverage due to Obamacare: “We’ve heard things so many times, we would immediately laugh because basically they’re jokes.”

25. In 2009, Sen. Reid “compared Obamacare opponents to supporters of slavery.”

In April of 2014, during the height of his Koch-bashing demagoguery, MRC’s Dan Joseph whittled the list down to the top 5 most idiotic Harry Reid statements. He did acknowledge that it was very difficult to narrow it down to only five.