It is an emperor has no clothes moment.  The partisan mainstream media has failed to show the slightest curiosity about an improbable story peddled by one of the central figures of the last six years of politics.  John Hinderaker of Powerline has been asking the questions about Harry Reid’s injuries and retirement from the Senate that a reasonably curious media should have been asking but hasn’t because Reid is a Democrat.

I noted the injuries that Reid suffered on New Year’s Day, in Las Vegas: multiple broken bones around his right eye, damage to the right eye, severe facial bruising, broken ribs, and a concussion. Was all of this really the result of losing his balance because an elastic exercise band broke? That seems unlikely, to say the least.

Anyone who saw Reid would say that he looked like he had been beaten up by a guy with a hard left, maybe using brass knuckles:

Face it: Reid has a very questionable past, having enriched himself with deals on land that became very profitable following federal government decisions.  Reid cultivated an image as a mob-fighter, once acting out on videotape he knew was rolling a show of outrage over an offered bribe.  But as Kevin Williamson notes at NRO:

Reid’s political incubator: mobbed-up unions fighting mobbed-up gambling interests, both sides quick to resort to violence but too blisteringly incompetent to manage very much of it effectively.

Hinderaker:

When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.

The people back home in Nevada aren’t really buying Reid’s story, and Hinderaker notes the amount of Google traffic around questioning Reid’s story.  Rumors can’t be given much credibility, of course, but they do tell us what people are thinking.  And the people in Nevada do know Reid better than the rest of us:

A friend of mine was in Las Vegas a week or two ago. He talked to a number of people there about Reid’s accident, and didn’t find anyone who believed the elastic exercise band story. The common assumption was that the incident resulted, in some fashion, from Reid’s relationship with organized crime. The principal rumor my friend heard was that Reid had promised to obtain some benefit for a group of mobsters. He met with them on New Year’s Day, and broke the bad news that he hadn’t been able to deliver what he promised. When the mobsters complained, Reid (according to the rumor) made a comment that they considered disrespectful, and one of them beat him up.

Harry Reid is a known liar.  Using the protection of the Senate floor, where he could not be sued for libel, he lied about Mitt Romney not paying income taxes.  His list of scurrilous charges against the Koch brothers is long and well-known.

The story here is as much about the propaganda press, which accepts unlikely stories, as it is about the man Harry Reid, who in my book is one of the worst politicians of our era. 

This blog has been bumped to Monday 3/30, owing to heavy traffic.