Then and Now

Harry Reid, August, 2012: Mitt Romney doesn’t pay taxes.

Harry Reid, August, 2008: Taxes are voluntary.

And just for fun, here’s a link to a picture of Harry Reid picking his nose.  At long last, sir, have you no decency?

Okay, totally not kidding about this: I just got a mass email from Harry Reid about the tax thing.  I think it’s time for a fisking:

The other day, I said that I’d been told by a very credible source that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes for ten years. Governor Romney got upset. But, you know what? I’m not backing down.

Yes, we noticed.  Let’s see how this plays out.

I’m not backing down because, when you run for President, you should be an open book.

But not when you run for Senate, apparently.  Or when you’re a Democrat running for President.  That second link is just about Obama’s personal records.  If we want to look at stuff his administration won’t disclose, we could look here, or here, or here.  Maybe, to be more realistic, I should start with something simple, like asking him to disclose what the capital of Israel is.

Governor Romney told me to “put up or shut up” — but he’s the one who’s shut up when people asked legitimate questions about his finances, and it’s up to him to put up his taxes so we can see the answers.

Harry Reid and I disagree on the nature of “legitimate questions.”  Unsourced, wildly improbable allegations that are rightly getting you laughed at are not legitimate questions.  Or are they?  In which case, Ried ought to respond to growing concerns that he is a pederast.

We can’t let Mitt Romney get away with this — not with hiding his taxes, and not with a tax plan that would reach into the pockets of the middle class to help multi-millionaires like himself.

Harry Reid thinks letting wealthy people keep more of their money – thus depriving the federal government of the ability to give that money to the middle class – is the same thing as taking money from the middle class.  In related news, Harry Reid is mentally retarded.

It’s well-known that wealthy individuals like Mitt Romney have all sorts of creative tricks to dodge taxes — offshore accounts, hidden loopholes, questionable deductions, and the like.

Scumbags like that shouldn’t be elected President!  They should be appointed to run the IRS, or to other cabinet positions.  Incidentally, you know why those loopholes and deductions exist?  Because Congress put them in place.  If only Harry Reid had some way to influence Congress to eliminate loopholes and deductions …

And it’s clear that the Romney campaign knows they have something to hide. After Governor Romney promised to tell the nation whether he’d ever paid a lower tax rate than the 13.9% he paid in the one year of taxes he partially released, his campaign quickly walked it back.

Questions about how much the guy paid are substantially different from questions about whether he full-on refused to pay any taxes for ten years.  Just like questions about why you have a shovel and a bag full of quicklime in your trunk, a bottle of chloroform in your glove compartment, and a subscription to Tiger Beat magazine … sorry, I forgot where I was going with that.

Reid’s ludicrous hypocrisy here is only slightly more frustrating than his transparent class warfare, which is also some pretty serious hypocrisy, for a guy with assets totaling $10,360,000.00.  How did he manage that?  It’s a rhetorical question, of course.