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Smearing Harry Reid
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Candidate
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Feb 10, 2006 10:34am |
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| Category | Blog Entry |
| News Date | Friday, February 10, 2006 12:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | by Scott Shields, Thu Feb 09, 2006 at 04:35:40 PM EST
Checking the latest headlines at Yahoo! News a few minutes ago, I was shocked to read that "Reid Aided Abramoff Clients, Records Show." Immediately, I clicked on it to get the story. My first impression was that, unless I wanted to be a complete and total hypocrite, I'd better post a criticism of Harry Reid, and fast. After all, if the leader of the Senate Democrats was indeed caught red-handed doing Jack Abramoff's bidding, we'd need to immediately marginalize him so as to not lose the upper hand in a debate about lobbying, ethics, and bribery. But as I started to read the article, I smelled a smear.
The first clue was that Senator Reid has a long history of protecting gambling in Nevada from outside competition. He does, after all, represent Las Vegas. So the fact that he sought to keep Indian casinos from expanding off of their reservations, while I may not necessarily agree, makes sense. He didn't need lobbyists telling him what to do on the issue, as he'd held that position long before they'd ever come knocking. But still... the article's a long one. I wasn't quite ready to dismiss it.
[snip]
The kicker, of course, is that for all of their effort, Reid never supported the Abramoff position. The very definition of "quid pro quo" is "this for that." In politics, this means something valuable like money or gifts for a politician's votes or some other form of official support. In this case, though Reid or his staffers may have taken meetings on the subject, it never amounted to anything. In other words, there may have been quid, but there was no quo. |
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