On Monday, Harry Reid, the outgoing Democratic Senate Minority Leader from Nevada, condemned the media for its apparent ambivalence about calling Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a “racist.”
“The media has a bunch of words to describe his actions. …Yet there’s always one word that many of the press conspicuously avoid: ‘racist,’ squealed Reid in a rant on the Senate floor. “They never label Trump a racist, but he is a racist.”
The remarks came just hours before the highly-anticipated debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, adding a palpable sense of urgency to the frail Senator’s tone.
“Why do reporters and pundits abstain from calling Trump what he is, a racist? His bigotry has been on display since the early days of his business career,” he insisted. “Trump [also] led the so-called birther movement to delegitimize our first African-American president.”
Drawing a deep, unbridgeable schism between the Senate floor, Reid also attacked his Republican counterparts for supporting “racist” Trump.
“”It’s time for Republicans to stop closing their eyes to Donald Trump’s racism, and it’s time for reporters and journalists to be honest with the American people,” he pontificated. “They owe America the truth.”
Citing Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s own words against him, Reid mentioned the fact that Ryan had once called Trump’s behavior “the textbook definition of racism.”
Reid must have a short memory. It wasn’t too long ago when hypocritical Harry unleashed his own “problematic” language, and more specifically, racial epithets, against his party’s nominal leader, President Barack Obama.
In their book entitled “Game Changer” chronicling the 2008 presidential election, journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann highlighted Reid’s racist words directed against Obama for all the world to read.
“He [Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ ” the book’s authors wrote, quoting Reid directly. “Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”
Shortly after the book was published, Reid issued a public apology for his “poor choice of words.”
“I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments,” he said in a statement to CNN. “I was a proud and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama during the campaign and have worked as hard as I can to advance President Obama’s legislative agenda.”