I won’t defend Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who—presumably because he’s not up for reelection—claimed last week that Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns because he hasn’t paid taxes in ten years. His source: An unnamed Bain insider. That’s improbable and I agree with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that it’s “beneath the dignity” of Mr. Reid’s office to spread rumors. (If it turns out Mr. Reid is correct, I’ll be the first to apologize.)
That said, all politics is undignified; it’s a bit rich for Mr. Reid’s opponents (Mr. Romney’s supporters) to head for the fainting couch. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called Mr. Reid a “dirty liar” and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said his allegations were “reckless and slanderous.” George Will, the conservative columnist, actually brought up McCarthyism:
Look, in 1950, Joe McCarthy went to West Virginia, didn’t know what to tell the women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, so he said, ‘I have in my hand a list of 205 communists in the State Department.’ He didn’t have a list. Harry Reid doesn’t have any evidence either. This is McCarthyism from the desert.
I fail to see the comparison. Michele Bachmann recently accused Huma Abedin of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. We should probably save our McCarthy references for things like that, shouldn’t we? And on the reckless-and-slanderous intensity scale, Mr. Reid’s allegations rank far below the sadly pervasive charges against the president: That he wasn’t born in the United States, that he’s a secret Muslim, that he’s a secret Marxist…Last I checked, none of these guys had called Donald Trump a dirty liar.
Generally the “your side does it, too” argument isn’t worth making. But the hypocrisy here is stunning.