The new year broke with bad news about former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Though maybe not as bad as suggested in that story by Mark Leibovich. "Reid, who is 79, does not have long to live," he wrote. "I hate to be so abrupt about this, but Reid probably would not mind."
Or maybe he would:
To be fair, he did say, of the cancerous lesion found on his pancreas, "As soon as you discover you have something on your pancreas, you're dead." But he had a lot else to say about his career, about politics, about Trump: "Trump is an interesting person. He is not immoral but is amoral. Amoral is when you shoot someone in the head, it doesn’t make a difference. No conscience. […] I think he is without question the worst president we've ever had. […] We've had some bad ones, and there's not even a close second to him.. […] He'll lie. He'll cheat. You can't reason with him." In case you needed to hear Reid's latest thoughts on the Russian asset in the Oval Office. And you know you did.
If you haven't read that New York Times profile, it's worth the time. Even better is the two-part interview from Jon Ralston at the Nevada Independent. (I'm still waiting to find out what he said about Daily Kos that didn't make it into the final copy.)
"I did things no one else would do," is how he summed up his public life with Ralston. That he most definitely did. He said the things and did the things that pissed off so many people, including the progressive base, so many times. But he did some pretty remarkable things. Like getting rid of the filibuster for judicial nominees—after a long, long, long battle we had working to convince him it was the thing to do—which ended Mitch McConnell's blockade on President Obama's nominees. Imagine how much worse the world would be if all those positions were left vacant for Trump to fill?
Reid said and did the things to advance our causes that few else would. For example, committing to that very first blogger gathering way back in 2006. The first Yearly Kos convention became a real thing largely because Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi showed up. The rest is history. Including Netroots Nation in July 2010, when we saw the remarkable, unscripted, totally real moment in which Reid promised Lt. Dan Choi he would end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." I was on the stage with Reid for that moment, and have to say that I have never seen a more real, genuine, emotional response from a politician on a public stage. I'll never forget it.
You might not know this, but one of the things Reid did at that very first Yearly Kos convention was to sign a quilt patch at the very first Yearly Kos in Las Vegas. It became a part of "From Red to Blue," the quilt that Bill in Portland Maine won.
Now we can thank him in kind, in the most purely Daily Kos way possible, with a Community Quilt of his own. Sara R has the pieces ready to go, she just needs your message and a contribution via PayPal (you can DM her for an address if you prefer to send a check).