Harry Reid

From Conservapedia

Harry Reid (b. December 2, 1939) is the senior Senator from Nevada and U.S. Senate Majority Leader in the 110th Congress. Reid is a member of the Democratic Party, and the first Mormon to become Senate Majority Leader.

1 Connections with Jack Abramoff
2 Boxing credentials
3 Las Vegas land deal
4 Iraq "lost"
5 Iraq war sellout
6 Rush Limbaugh Phony Soldier Incident
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

Connections with Jack Abramoff

Reid has received over $60,000 from Jack Abramoff related groups, including about $50,000 from Native American gaming interests. Several times, Native American tribes that were clients of Jack Abramoff donated money to Reid after Reid's votes produced favorable results for the tribes. However, Reid described the Abramoff affair as "a Republican scandal."

Boxing credentials

Reid has accepted free tickets valued at hundreds of dollars for boxing matches between 2003 and 2005 from the Nevada Athletic Commission. Senate ethics rules permit gifts from such governmental agencies.

Las Vegas land deal

Senator Reid came under fire in 2006 for failing to properly report to Congress a $700,000 land deal. Harry Reid's member interest in limited liability company (LLC) was allocated $1.1 million of the gross proceeds attributable to the sale of a parcel of land. In 1998, Reid bought a plot of land for $400,000, fair market value at the time. One of the sellers was a developer who arranged a land swap that Reid supported.

Iraq "lost"

On April 19 2007, representatives of 50 Iraqi Sunni tribes announced the formation of a new democratic political party called Iraq Awakening, with the aim of fielding candidates in elections at all levels of government, including the parliamentary elections in 2009. In the predominantly Shiite country, a large scale political organization among the Sunni is precisely what al-Qaeda insurgents have opposed. Later the same day, Sen. Reid demanded the pullout of American forces, on the basis that Iraq had been "lost". ^[1] In May, Majority Leader Reid voted to fund the "lost" cause anyway.

Iraq war sellout

In a scathing rebuke of the Democratic leadership for agreeing to an endless troop commitment in the Iraq war, in exchange for a $1.40 cent hike in the minimum wage, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann said this shortly after Reid assumed the reins as U.S. Senate Majority Leader:

After six months of preparation and execution—half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:
The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president—if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history—who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;
The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans...
You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions—Stop The War—have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans... Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning... is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.... “We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame,” Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. “My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…” That’s what this is for the Democrats, isn’t it? Their “Neville Chamberlain moment” before the Second World War....
Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats... have failed us. They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible....
Mr. Reid has failed. ^[2]

Rush Limbaugh Phony Soldier Incident

On October 2, 2007, Senator Reid wrote a letter to Mark P. Mays, Chairman-of-the-board and CEO of Clear Channel Communications, who are Rush Limbaugh's chief patrons. In it Senator Reid essentially demanded that Mr. Mays order Mr. Limbaugh apologize for certain remarks that Mr. Limbaugh allegedly made, to the effect that soldiers who opposed the prosecution of the war in Iraq were "phony soldiers."^[3] In composing his letter and his later remarks, Reid relied heavily on a presentation and alleged analysis by Media Matters for America. In fact, the only soldiers that Mr. Limbaugh ever alleged to be "phony" were certain persons who falsely claimed to have served in Iraq; some of those persons were in fact tried for and convicted of misrepresentation of service and drew prison sentences for their conduct. Nevertheless Mr. Reid obtained the signatures of forty of his Senate colleagues on his accusatory letter and read the letter aloud on the floor of the Senate.

The letter was delivered, and Mr. Limbaugh ultimately obtained it. Mr. Limbaugh publicly exhibited it to an audience in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 11. The next day he placed the letter for sale at public auction at eBay.com.^[4] The letter fetched a final price of more than two million US dollars. Rush donated the entire proceeds to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, and included a matching contribution of his own. In his remarks on the air on the day that the auction ended, and for several days before that, Mr. Limbaugh speculated that Senator Reid probably never imagined that his letter would even be made public, much less set a record for the most expensive charity auction in the records of eBay.com.^[5]

At noon EDT October 19, 2007, Senator Reid spoke again to this issue on the floor of the Senate, taking note of the astonishing auction price that the letter was sure to fetch (the auction was still running at the time). He suggested in his remarks that he had spoken to Mr. Mays personally about the prospect of the public auction and had expressed doubts that such an auction would fetch more than a trifling sum.^[6] Rush Limbaugh played the recording of Mr. Reid's remarks on his radio program and scathingly suggested that Mr. Reid was now attempting to take credit after the fact for the success of the auction and the massive charitable donation that would result from it.^[7]

Images of the text of the letter, and the signatures of the Senators, appear below: