Dingy, Dirty, Really Disgusting Harry Reid
(and the Bipartisan Culture of Corruption)

Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate, and you're not.  Harry Reid lives in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, and you don't.  Harry Reid flipped a $400,000 real estate purchase into a 175 percent profit, and you didn't.  Harry Reid gave $3300 in Christmas bonuses to Ritz-Carlton service staff out of campaign funds, and you can't.

Without much encouragement, Harry Reid will relate his biography, reminiscent of the best up-from-the-earth country song.  But the Searchlight, Nevada hometown jukebox on which it played is long time gone, and Harry Reid has, shall we say, risen beneath his poor-but-righteous circumstances.

Reid's land deal is nothing like a country song, and he didn't sing it.  John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessey of the Associated Press did.  The deal is complicated, but the short version is that, in 1998, Reid bought residentially zoned land outside Las Vegas for $400,000, which he transferred three years later to a corporation run by a friend, with whom Reid had bought part of the land.  The land then got rezoned for commercial use, and was sold by the corporation, from which Reid got $1.1 million.  There seem to be no records of Reid's stake in the company.

In his Senate Ethics Report on acquisition and sale of the land, Reid treated it as a simple, personal, bought some land, sold some land transaction, omitting the transfer to the corporation.

Some of the land involved in the overall deal was even originally yours, meaning federal government land miraculously transformed into private in an Interior Department land swap with a developer.  Right there outside boomtown.  Right there for those with the power and influence of Harry Reid, his friends and family, to pick up cheap, get rezoned and flip for a hefty profit.

Reacting to the AP's annoying disclosure of the deal, Harry Reid rushed to amend his ethics reports, including several other transactions resulting from "clerical errors."  No bother, it's not like the Senate Ethics Committee will do anything meaningful.

If the land deal is the stuff of men who wear diamonds, the campaign-financed Christmas gifts to the service staff at Reid's personal residence is the stuff of petty public office grifters who have learned to live off the political fat of the land.  Having had that little lawyer-approved dodge exposed, Reid is now repaying the $3300 from personal funds, so all's made right in the world.

No, it isn't.  Public office, even for the Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate, is not an entitlement.  The public's business is not served by batteries of legal and accounting retainers figuring out how to game the system for personal gain.

Exposed by the AP, Reid blamed the land deal story on Republicans trying to affect the upcoming elections (the alcoholism excuse being a tad overworked of late by Republicans Mark Foley and Robert Ney, with all rehab centers full up to the walls).  Some people will even believe that, automatically becoming eligible to buy land from Harry Reid, because the AP specifically attributed the information on the land deal to a former Reid adviser.

"Shock" and "disgust" are words Harry Reid himself has previously used to describe "revelations of corruption in our current system."  In his case, there should be shock and disgust if there is not a full investigation of all elements of the land deal, because numerous of those elements stink to high heaven, and ethics reports amended until doomsday will not answer - nor are they intended to answer - the really pertinent questions.

We are not nearly so na�ve as to believe meaningful investigations will occur.  We are reasonably confident that Washington's "Culture of Corruption," the issue so beloved by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi until it scurried from under her own party's prissy  skirts, will continue unabated, the only true bipartisan activity in Washington.

As we were writing this, USA Today published an editorial headlined "Shameless money schemes stain Congress' reputation." 

What reputation?