The Minority Leader

Whenever I see him speaking, I start trying to find the words to describe him. He's a mousey looking man with a mild manner who says outrageous things from the Democrat talking points without a blush. Dennis Prager focuses on Reid as the model for his deconstruction of what passes today for liberal "thought." It occurred to me today, listening to callers to Michael Medved's program how isolated from reality most of these people are. They seem to start with their desired outcome, a failure of Bush's policy in Iraq, for example, then they construct a scenario and it becomes their reality, whether it's real or not. When a historian refutes the scenario with a study of previous wars, the response is a chorus of "that can't be right" and "it doesn't work that way."

Prager has noticed another pattern:

Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.

One-word put-downs of opponents' ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual -- their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors -- liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm.

Which brings me back to the perfect word for Harry Reid: pipsqueak.