I have a soft spot for Harry Reid. Not for his politics, which remain mostly retrograde, but for the man. He is pugnacious and unvarnished, a real street fighter. Reid has a voice like scratched vinyl, but he is a straight shooter, who rarely speaks cryptically. When he takes a stand, he doesn’t flinch under fire. In a time of political clones, Reid is an original, a working-class Westerner, whose mother, Inez, was a laundress and father a miner, who later killed himself during a period of prolonged unemployment. Reid grew up in the desert outpost of Searchlight, in a company hovel without a toilet or a telephone. He put himself through college and law school and clawed his way through the hard-scrabble terrain of Nevada politics from the ground up. Reid is tenacious. For more than 15 years, he has almost single-handedly blocked the nuclear industry’s dream of dumping radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada. counterpunch.org/2015/01/02/the-age-of-surrealpolitik/
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 05:04:21 +0000
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