Harry Reid 'just doesn't care

Veteran reporter Jon Ralston has covered Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) for about a quarter of a century. In Politico Magazine, Ralston recalls one of the best Reid anecdotes ever:

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

... I remember in the early 1990s, shortly after I had made the transition from reporter to columnist, asking to speak to him about a column I was working on about him accepting honoraria for speaking engagements. Reid insisted to me that he needed the money to pay for his wife’s medical condition—she has Crohn’s disease—and when I suggested he was quite wealthy and could sell some of his vast real estate holdings (he reported assets of between $2.8 million and $6.3 million earlier this year), he responded by telling me he would not speak to me again if I wrote the column. I don’t believe he said goodbye.

I wrote it. And Reid cut me off for about two years.

I still recall the day the freeze-out ended. His longtime assistant, Marge Van Hoove, who died earlier this year, called to tell me the senator wanted to see me in his Las Vegas office. When I sat down in front of him, Reid told me, “I’ve decided to speak to you again.”

“Senator,” I replied, “you might have noticed that I continued to write about you all of this time. Who do you think lost in this proposition?”

As if he hadn’t heard me, Reid pivoted and began talking about some policy issue. I remember thinking: He just doesn’t care.

Indeed, he "just doesn't care." It's a sentiment captured in TheBlaze Blog's regular feature, "Absolute a**hole or honest?"