When Politico asked Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid about Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democratic senatorial candidate from Nevada who’s running to replace Reid after he retires, he declared she’s “striking in appearance.”
“She reminds me a lot of Dianne Feinstein,” he said. “I say that because she’s striking in appearance. She has a lot of dignity and she reminds me a lot of Dianne. I think she’ll be an outstanding senator. She won’t be like me. She’ll be a little more measured, a little – she’ll be her.”
Way to talk up Cortez Masto’s personal achievements as opposed to the qualities her momma gave her, Reid. Because professional women want to be recognized and applauded for their looks rather than accomplishments, right? This isn’t the first time Reid has made a crack about someone’s appearance, either. For one, he’s a well-known fat-shamer.
“He has an intolerance for fat people, manifested in asides to aides who seem to be getting portly and an office staff that is suspiciously slim,”
“Your dog is fat,” Reid told then-President George W. Bush in 2008.
The Democratic politician, who infamously presided over squeezing Obamacare through the Senate in 2010 by cutting myriad closed-door political deals, has made many other statements that would have immediately gotten a Republican canned. The press, however, has constantly given Reid a pass.
In 2008, Reid attributed President Obama’s electoral appeal to being a “light-skinned” black man who did not have a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” He’s said African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a robust conservative, “has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court.”
“I think that [Thomas’s] opinions are poorly written. I just don’t think that he’s done a good job as a Supreme Court justice,” Reid said in 2004 as Republicans were mulling appointing Thomas to chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
When he was campaigning for re-election in 2010, Reid told a largely Hispanic audience, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay. Do I need to say more?” Leftwing groups took up a similar tack of negating voters’ ethnicity if they vote for the “wrong” politicians by insisting in 2015 that Republican senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were “traitors” to their “culture.”
