“Harry Reid’s big fib on Mitt Romney taxes: Why it matters”

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but I’m a pretty vocal political conservative, tending strongly libertarian on economic matters.  I have, nonetheless, felt obliged to come out in defense of Senator Harry Reid, a liberal Democrat, on a few occasions, notwithstanding my deep and varied policy differences with him and my distaste for some of his tactics.  (See, for example, here, here, and here.)

But his casual slander — on the floor of the United States Senate, no less! — against Governor Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign was disgraceful, and his complacent self-satisfaction about it even now is contemptible.  And I’m not the only observer who sees it that way:

http://link.csmonitor.com/50f0782b21e070dffaa072ae2g54h.4bc/VRwPrMPow3zxfEuGA1230

And, of course, the fact that Senator Reid was publicly maligning a fellow Latter-day Saint makes his behavior, if possible, even more deplorable.  I hope that he’ll use his impending retirement as an occasion for repentance, and for remembering that “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is one of the Ten Commandments.  And there’s no exception made in the Bible for the usefulness of slander as a political tactic.