Mitt Romney continues to be the target of a low, unsourced, unfounded attack from Harry Reid. I feel really, really bad about that.
No, actually, I don't.
...In an interview published Tuesday, Reid said an investor in Bain Capital, the former private equity firm of the Republican presidential candidate, told him in a phone call that Romney had paid zero taxes....Poor Mitt. Logic tells us that Reid couldn't possibly have heard this from multiple sources, so he's just blowing smoke. And yet, even if it's a lie, Reid's put Romney on the spot, because what he's saying sounds plausible to a lot of people.
On Wednesday, Reid stuck to his story, and broadened it.
"I am not basing this on some figment of my imagination," Reid said in a telephone call with Nevada reporters. "I have had a number of people tell me that."
Asked to elaborate on his sources, Reid declined. "No, that's the best you're going to get from me."
...A Romney spokesman said Reid's charge was baseless and below the belt....
Y'know, it's a bit like saying that the current president is a secret Muslim socialist who lied about his U.S. birth and has a fake Social Security number and is secretly plotting to take away all privately owned guns if he's reelected, either before or after he finishes the job of deliberately destroying American capitalism. It's also a bit like saying that the previous Democratic president was a drug dealing serial murderer and rapist whose lesbian wife had her male lover killed when she wasn't hanging sex toys on the White House Christmas tree.
It's almost like that. The difference is that Romney's not facing an ever-expanding list of accusations, most of them truly grotesque and preposterous, many of them of a felonious or treasonous nature, spread by multiple prominent rumormongers over the course of years, and believed in every particular by roughly a third of the country. Hell, what he's being charged with isn't even illegal.
But still, welcome to our world, Mitt. Now you have a vague sense of how Democrats feel all the time.
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UPDATE: What it would really be like if Mitt Romney were a Democrat, via BooMan.
