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From the diaries -- kos)
Wow, I have to thank Chris Sullentrop for educating me on some of Harry Reid's more interesting qualities. The Highlights:
To take just one example, is there another U.S. senator who has been part of the inspiration for a character in a Martin Scorsese film? (A character played by Dick Smothers, no less.) In Casino, Robert DeNiro's character melts down in front of the Nevada Gaming Commission after the commission denies him a license to operate a casino. The scene is loosely based on a December 1978 hearing when Reid was the commission's chairman, and some of the dialogue spoken by Smothers is taken directly from Reid's words during the hearing [...]
Sure, Reid can sap these stories of some of some of their innate interest. "Well, it's true that when I served with the Gaming Commission that I had a number of threats on my life," he told me during a brief interview earlier this week. When talking about taping the windows in his house to protect his family from the threat of shattered glass, he used the same tone that he used to discuss the importance of Senate procedure. But no matter what tone you use to discuss the fact that your wife once discovered a bomb wired to one of the family cars, it's not boring [...]
And here's another story from Reid's tenure as chairman of the gaming commission: A man named Jack Gordon, who later married LaToya Jackson, tried to give Reid a $12,000 bribe. Reid let the FBI videotape Gordon offering him the bribe, and then, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal account, he "put his hands around Gordon's neck and said, 'You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe me.'" That's right, Senate Democrats are being led by a man who once tried to strangle LaToya Jackson's future husband-manager. You call that boring?
I'm not saying any of this will affect his performance as leader, but it's interesting stuff nonetheless when one considers how he's usually described in the press as "boring."