U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said the following on the Senate floor today:

“Harry Reid, the majority leader, is my friend. He’s served this honorable body with distinction ever since joining it in 1987. But I cannot overlook the phone call I received today from a very reliable source who I will not name who stated the following: Harry Reid has been molesting young boys who have visited the Capitol building these last 10 years. Harry Reid is - and I quote from my reliable email sources - the Jerry Sandusky of the United States Senate. Now, I don’t know if this is true, but it’s out there: Harry Reid sexually attacks prepubescent boys who want nothing more than a fun civics lesson and a trip to the Lincoln Memorial. I feel it is now incumbent upon me to demand Harry Reid - who I must say acts very grandfatherly around his own grandsons - prove he’s never been a serial child predator. The focus shouldn’t be on me. Harry Reid is the one I’m alleging raped boys. He can clear this up right away by denying he’s never sodomized countless members of our precious youth. Harry, I know these boys are so terrified of you that they’ll never admit to what you did to them, so don’t bother asking that they show themselves to disprove me. They won’t. Harry Reid, you’re the child molester, and you need to prove otherwise to remove this taint that the media will help to linger. Now get going, Jerry.”

Mitch McConnell never said this. Nor would he. He is a decent man who would never allege – on the Senate floor, no less – that someone was a felon without the ability to prove it. The titles of Senate Majority and Minority Leader, in theory, carry weight and meaning for the people who hold them: they are high-ranking standard-bearers of their parties, not just in the Senate, but as a whole.

Harry Reid has no standards. There is nothing honorable about him. Barack Obama, the man Reid is trying to help, the man who has called for all of us to tone down the heated rhetoric in Washington, has not condemned this slander, nor will he. Doing so requires honor.