The only scene in the massively overrated American Beauty that's stayed with me is the one in which Kevin Spacey's hapless Lester Burnham blackjacks a terrific severance package out of the company that's firing him by threatening the oily corporate drone who's doing the deed with a sexual-harassment suit. When said drone comments that Spacey seems really rather twisted, Spacey replies, "I'm just an ordinary guy with nothin' to lose."

You'd think by now that everyone would have figured out that Harry Reid has nothing to lose.

He's 72 years old, and he's probably still in the Senate only because the Republicans in Nevada lost their minds the last time around and nominated a political pinhead named Sharron Angle to run against him. He likely will not stand for re-election again in 2016. He has no political aspirations beyond being the Majority Leader of the Senate, which he already is, and the Senate has been rendered utterly dysfunctional anyway by Republican vandalism and its own rules. So why, exactly, would Harry Reid let up on the subject of the tax returns that Willard Romney apparently fed to his dancing horse?

Official Washington has been agog for weeks now over Reid's charges that an anonymous investor in Bain Capital had told him that Romney had paid no federal income taxes over the previous 10 years. Conservatives who make a living at being outraged are earning overtime pay. Other Republicans are also howling; I thought Republican National chairman and obvious anagram Reince Priebus was going to stroke out on TV over the weekend. Beltway pundits are stroking their chins vigorously. Fresh off a series of public embarrassments that demonstrated their ultimate uselessness, professional "fact-checkers" of the media are handing out Pinocchios and accusing Reid's pants of excessive flammability. (Glenn Kessler's work on this is particularly hilarious. He has absolutely no way of knowing if Reid's anonymous source is telling the truth, but he concludes that Reid is "probably" lying based on the opinion of "tax experts" who have no idea, either. This is a great gig if you can get it.) The name of Joe McCarthy is being invoked passionately more often than it is at Ann Coulter's house in the dark of night when she finally finds where it is that she hid the last of the C batteries.

I look at this story and I do not think of Joe McCarthy. I look at this story and I think of Vince Foster.

On July 20, 1993, Foster, then a deputy White House counsel in the administration of President Bill Clinton, drove to Fort Marcy Park in Washington, sat down under a tree, and shot himself in the head. Foster had been depressed, and he had been subject to truthless and relentless attacks by the conservative media, particularly the cracker factory from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which he specifically cited in his suicide note, which was something of a first for an American media outlet. Unfortunately for Foster's family, and for the nation as a whole, Bill Clinton had enemies who would not allow poor Vince Foster to stay dead. To cite only one egregious example, Rush Limbaugh, the intellectual anchor of modern conservative thought, went on his 11 gazillion radio stations and passed along a rumor that Foster had died in an apartment that he and Hillary Clinton had used for their romantic assignations, and that his body had been moved to Fort Marcy Park.

Conspiracy rumors about how and when and why Foster died became a cottage industry among those people who were looking for anything with which to discredit the Democratic president. (Historians will note that the bizarre attacks on Barack Obama were rehearsed by the entire political world between the years 1992 and 2000.) However, and this is the most important however, they did not stay as solely the province of the wingnut-o-sphere. Despite the fact that Foster's death had been ruled a suicide by the United States Park Police, who had primary jurisdiction in the case, we were treated to two full congressional investigations, one of which was highlighted by the famous episode in which an actual U.S. congressman named Dan Burton shot a melon in his backyard in an attempt to prove that the forensics in Foster's case had been rigged. The original Whitewater special prosecutor, an honest fellow named Robert Fiske, got replaced at least in part because he concluded that Foster had killed himself, which is how we ended up with Ken Starr, and all the hell that followed after him. And, in 1997, even Starr concluded that Foster's death was a suicide.

Remember that all of these preposterous exercises were covered extensively by the mainstream media, almost all of whom knew — or damn sure should have known after, say, the second congressional investigation — that they were chasing moonbeams . (This was before Glenn Kessler and the PolitiFact elves were around to keep us all honest and hand out Pinocchios.) However, the operational guide was what the redoubtable Digby always has called Cokie's Law, after something Cokie Roberts burbled on television in the middle of all the sheet-sniffing madness.

"At this point," said Roberts, "it doesn't much matter whether she said it or not because it's become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about."

I have no idea why Reid decided to go all-in on this point. Maybe he's just fed up with the Republicans and what they've done to the Senate that he loves. Maybe it's some sort of intramural Mormon brawl that the rest of us just don't understand. I am open to any suggestion based on the concept of pure old-dude cussedness. I don't have any idea whether Willard Romney paid no taxes, or some taxes, or paid an annual tribute to Anubis, Egyptian God Of The Dead, over the years in question. Neither, I would point out, do Glenn Kessler, or his tax experts, or the PolitiFact elves, or Reince Priebus. This is because Willard Romney, unlike any presidential candidate of my experience, declines to share those details with The Help as he seeks to be appointed CEO of America. But neither am I morally outraged that Reid is playing the kind of politics he is playing with this. That is because, when I consider what he's doing, I do not think of Joe McCarthy. I think of Vince Foster, and I am conspicuously unmoved.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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