Is Harry Reid in denial?

By Joseph Smith

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sounds like he wants to believe Tea Party activists have a very short attention span.

Fox News reports, and Real Clear Politics has the video, if you have the stomach for it:

"The Tea Party will disappear when the economy gets better and the economy's getting better all the time," Reid said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" that's set to air Sunday.

Perhaps Mr. Reid is woefully unaware of what the Tea Party has been saying these past two tumultuous years. Or maybe he is simply the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, holding back the rising tide of conservatism in America, hoping in vain to stave off the inevitable.

Mr. Reid apparently is in denial of the fact that the national debt increased from $8.67 trillion to $13.87 trillion during his four years as Senate Majority Leader.

That is $5.2 trillion (or $5,200,000,000,000,000) taken from future generations under the Reid-Pelosi leadership, not to mention the hideous health care behemoth they have unleashed, which, if Medicare is any precedent, will far exceed any cost estimates the Democrats think Americans are gullible enough to believe.

Reid is apparently laboring under the delusion that millions of newly-awakened Tea Party Americans will simply blow their party horns and then go right back to sleep, fold their tents and go home.

The delusion that he and his party can go back to business-as-usual with impunity. Or the delusion that fiscal responsibility, limited government and our priceless freedoms no longer matter to concerned Americans.

On the other hand, Mr. Reid's disdain for the Tea Party may simply stem from the same condescending mind that once said "you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol."