… the WaPo Fact Checker awards four Pinocchios to Harry Reid for his bogus claim that Mitt Romney paid no taxes for ten years.
We use a reasonable person standard here. Without seeing Romney’s taxes, we cannot definitively prove Reid incorrect. But tax experts say his claim is highly improbable. Reid also has made no effort to explain why his unnamed source would be credible. So, in the absence of more information, it appears he has no basis to make his incendiary claim.
Moreover, Reid holds a position of great authority in the U.S. Congress. He should hold himself to a high standard of accuracy when making claims about political opponents.
More to the point, Harry Reid is a lying politician who should be heckled off the public stage.
UPDATE—WaPo, which has been acting as if it were an official publication of the Obama reelection campaign, seems to be putting more daylight between themselves and Dingy Harry. Richard Cohen writes:
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.
That’s the opening of his column. It closes with this:
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.
It’s almost as if they can sense that there may be a new center of power in Washington.
Hmmmmm.
UPDATE 2—Smitty seems unimpressed with Mr. Cohen’s insights.