Boy, the conspiracy theorists—and by that I mean people sad that Benghazi turned into nothing—are really scraping the bottom of the barrel on this one, starting with this tweet:
Per @jhinderaker, has any journalist looked into the specifics of Harry Reid's exercise equipment accident?
— @ByronYork
Vox's Matt Yglesias
explains.
Behind this somewhat enigmatic tweet lies a rather elaborate conspiracy theory. @jhinderaker is John Hinderaker, one of the proprietors of the conservative blog PowerLine, and he's peddling a theory that the injuries Reid suffered while exercising in January weren't an accident at all. To Hinderaker the official story is just a coverup for an incident that involves mafia violence—likely the fallout of what Hinderaker alleges to be long-running corruption on the part of the Nevada Senator and Democratic Senate leader.
"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,'" Hinderaker writes, "it isn't hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters."
Ah, the triumphant return of
Assrocket, the "brains" behind
Time Magazine's
2004 blog of the year (the good old days). What makes this conspiracy theory particularly fun, besides the total lack of evidence and total degree of speculation here ("I have no idea" whether that's what really happened. But it's "a more likely story than the elastic exercise band yarn.") is the idea that Reid is in cahoots with the mob. The mob that
tried to blow him up with a car bomb in 1981 when he was on the Nevada Gaming Commission. The mob that he worked with the FBI to sting in 1978.
That and the fact that "Reid has a security detail and, indeed, members of the detail were on site and drove the senator to St. Rose Hospital near his home in Henderson after his accident, so these putative mobsters would have had their work cut out for them."
Never mind all that! Assrocket has ridiculous questions and Byron York thinks journalists should be looking into them. Again.