Jon Ralston is no Harry Reid-hater. But he is a veteran reporter, now a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, who has spent a quarter-century covering Nevada politics. Now, with the Senate minority leader planning to retire — and adamant that he has no regrets about his most odious tactics — Ralston reveals that at least one major newspaper has been in the senator’s pocket for some time. Ralston posted the following to his personal website today:

Now that CNN’s Dana Bash has found Harry Reid to be unrepentant about his Mitt Romney tax lies, it’s finally time to publish a column I wrote contemporaneously with the Nevada senator’s McCarthy-like tactic during the 2012 campaign. The column was never published because Las Vegas Sun editor Brian Greenspun attempted to protect his friend, Reid, from the criticism.
I never wrote for the Sun again.

An excerpt from the never-published column:

It’s one thing to use every trick in the book to win a campaign or to carelessly spout invective about other public figures. But it’s quite another thing for one of the most powerful Democrats in the country to make serious assertions about a Republican presidential candidate, without any proof and without a named source. Sometimes the ends do not justify the means, even in the political swamp. Someone needs to draw the line for Reid since he is so unable to draw one for himself.

Read the whole thing here.

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy,” James Madison wrote in 1822, “or, perhaps both.” “Farce” and “tragedy” are both accurate descriptions of the long and loathsome political life of Harry Reid.