Harry Reid, Man of Insight and Perspicacity and Dignified Dignitude

Two Harry Reid stories.

One.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that liberal groups targeting moderate Democrats with ads should back off, saying pressure from the left wing of his party won't be helpful to enacting legislation.

"I think it's very unwise and not helpful," Reid said Friday morning. "These groups should leave them alone. It's not helpful to me. It's not helpful to the Democratic Caucus"...

A number of liberal activists have expressed concerns about a group of 16 Senate Democratic moderates who have been meeting in an attempt to bolster their influence. 

Reid has no qualms about the group, and said that "any public statements" Senate moderates have made have been helpful as the chamber takes up a budget next week that would cost more than $3 trillion. And he added: "Some people of course go to those meetings so they can issue a press release back home that'll make them appear more moderate."

Two. And this one tells us an awful lot about Reid's amazingly brilliantly amazing ability to figure out who's a moderate and who's only faking it:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that John Roberts misled the Senate during his confirmation hearings by pretending to be a moderate — and that the United States is now "stuck" with him as chief justice. 

"Roberts didn’t tell us the truth. At least Alito told us who he was," Reid said, referring to Samuel Alito, the second Supreme Court justice nominated by President George W. Bush. "But we’re stuck with those two young men, and we’ll try to change by having some moderates in the federal courts system as time goes on — I think that will happen."

Reid's comments, which came during a wide-ranging discussion hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, reflect Democratic concerns that Roberts presented himself as a neutral arbiter of the law but has wielded a relentlessly conservative agenda.

Keep this man away from 3-Cart Monte tables. Though, of course, it's no skin off his nose that he keeps getting pantsed by "moderates." After all, he is a Senator, the Sernator Majority Leader, and by default a Very Serious Person Worthy of Respect. And as such, rest assured, he will always be foursquare against Extremism:

Although Reid said that Democrats will try to put moderates on the bench, he said he will not try to deny Republicans the right to filibuster nominees.

Gosh no! Why,

"As I said at the time, the nuclear option was the most important issue I've ever worked on in my entire career, because if that had gone forward it would have destroyed the Senate as we know it," Reid said.

Because where would we all be without "the Senate as we know it," why, we would be fucked. Extremists might have seized control of the Supreme Court, or something.

Because the "Senate as we know it" is a wonderfully democratic institution, especially with the filibuster guaranteeing the right of a party that controls nothing to veto everything the majority of the people of the country voted for, although this only holds true in the case of Republicans. I think that's in the Constitution somewhere.

Anyhow Reid cares more about preposterous Senatorial notions of Civilized Senatorial Procedure than he does about anything else; he says so himself. This is very perfectly Senatorial, and a large part of the reason why there's such an amazingly inverse relationship between how most people see the Senate (a gang of clowns) and how Senators see themselves (Gods, basically).

MORE. At least Reid can console himself that he's brighter and more honest than Althouse, who sniffily declaims to her comment section, like Norma Desmond doing an Atticus Finch impression to the rats in in a potato cellar:

Apparently, the judges whose opinions track your political positions are, in your book, the "moderates." That is the lesson I think you are trying to teach people. It is a lesson that undermines the integrity of law. It goes right along with Barney Frank's recent, despicable assertion that Justice Scalia is a homophobe.

Huff! Flounce! Vogue! Jump back! Kiss myself!

Apparently you have to be either a law professor or a senator to be enough of a moron to take seriously the Senate confirmation kabuki, or to believe that this distinction between "the law" and "politics" when it comes to Supreme Court positions is anything other than ludicrous, obfuscatory horseshit.