Reid Vaporizes

There's a noteworthy line from Terminator Salvation that goes, "If you're gonna pull a gun on somebody, you'd BETTER be ready to pull the trigger."  The corallary is, "and the gun had BETTER be big enough to kill the target, AND be pointed in the right direction."

When Senate Majority Chisler "Dirty Harry" Reid decided and embarked upon his strategy of "vaporizing" Republican challenger Sharron Angle with a fusillade of negative advertising, it did have its intended effect - at first.  Angle opened the general campaign back at the beginning of the summer with a high single-digits lead that Pencilneck's slime offensive quickly collapsed into a dead heat.  The problem for Dirty Harry is that it carried him no further.  This dead heat has lasted for months, see-sawing back and forth within a four-point range either side of zero, the artificially-generated uncertainties about Angle precisely balanced by the enormous unpopularity of Reid.

Hot Air's Eeyore, per his buzzkill gimmick, has opined that this meant advantage-Reid on the grounds that Nevada voters would opt to "stay with the devil they know than take a chance on the devil they don't know".  I've generally dissented from that view, but I can certainly acknowledge the possibility it suggests.  In any normal election cycle such an enormous barrage of hit ads WOULD have completely destroyed a hapless candidate like Angle; indeed, such a barrage wouldn't have even been necessary, as Reid would have led handily from the beginning and never been headed.  But this is the antithesis of a normal election cycle, one in which the Searchlight SOB couldn't afford to take any chances.

So we come to the $64 question: Why did he agree to a debate at all?  Conventional wisdom holds that they can only hurt incumbents and help challengers, which is why challengers always want face-to-face encounters.  How much more does that axiom seem to apply to Dirty Harry, where even giving Sharron Angle the opportunity to demonstrate that the comic book caricature of her that Reid's vaporization campaign depicted was nonsense was a risk he could ill-afford?

Here's a sample of Angle's performance:

Nothing that would tilt the charisma meter, but given that Reid had set the bar of expectation at "Cindy Brady on the quiz show"....

....all she had to do to "win" the debate was speak in complete sentences and not wet her pants.  Mission accomplished - easily.  She came off like she has for the entire campaign, like everybody's favorite grandmother, or Martha Wilson.  Voters would be far more likely to fear FOR her going to the U.S. Senate than be afraid OF her.

Even the Obamedia verdict was that she passed that bar with flying colors - and that it was Dirty Harry who mumbled incoherently and pissed himself:

Angle won because she looked relatively credible, appearing not to be the Wicked Witch of the West....and scoring many more rhetorical points. And she won because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid looked as if he could barely stay on a linear argument, abruptly switching gears and failing to effectively parry or thrust.

In other words, he came off like George Wilson after Dennis Mitchell awoke him from a nap by blasting a bugle in his ear.  He's been in D.C. for so long, and not been substantively challenged and held accountable for his corrupt shenanigans for so long, that he came into this face-off functionally unarmed.  And my God, did it show - more than enough to tip the election decisively in Aereon's favor.

And don't think he doesn't know it:

You see, I'm a little confused because there must be another Harry Reid who said the war in Iraq was lost, because this Harry Reid now says he never said that.

According to Reid's campaign site, Republicans and Sharron Angle have lied about his actual quote.  On his website, they contain the "real" quote: "The war cannot be won militarily. It can only be won politically."  According to his campaign, Reid said that March 3, 2007, referencing a supposed statement by General David Petraeus.

Here's the actual quote:

{blink} I'm with Ensign Ed: Pencilneck has never heard of YouTube?  And why would he pick this particular "Angle of attack"?  Logic would almost require that it be because Team Chisler thought it was one that was easily refutable.  He's REALLY never heard of YouTube?

Get the fork ready, folks.