"Harry Reid, you're a dirty liar."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in calling out Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for declining to release all but his most recent tax returns, suggested that Romney's late father, also a politician, would have been enbarrassed at his son's stance. The remark came as Reid quoted an unnamed former business acquaintance of Romney's as claiming the candidate had avoided taxes for a full decade -- that presumably being the reason he wouldn't want the returns to be made public. His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son," Reid said in an interview with the Huffington Post. Reid, however, did not name his source, admitted he had no real proof, and said he isn’t sure whether it’s true. He repeated the accusation on the Senate floor, a move Republicans characterized as politically motivated and inappropriate. Senators cannot be sued for defamation over statements made on the chamber floor.

Senator Lindsey Graham

On ABC's "This Week," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus called Reid a "dirty liar" for claiming that someone told him Mitt Romney didn't pay taxes for ten years. “As far as Harry Reid is concerned, listen, you might want to go down that road, I'm not going to respond to a dirty liar...,” Preibus said Sunday. …. “This is just a made-up issue. The fact that we're going to spend any time talking about it is just ridiculous," he added. 

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also ripped into Reid on Sunday, telling CNN’s “State of the Union” that “what he [Reid] did on the Senate floor is so out of bounds. I think he’s lying about his statement of knowing something about Romney.” “Let's start talking about the real issues that matter to real people and I just can't let that pass. I just cannot believe that the majority leader of the United States Senate would take the floor twice, make accusations that are absolutely unfounded, in my view, and quite frankly making things up to divert the camp campaign away from the real issues,” he said.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell called Reid’s comments “reckless and slanderous.” “You know what we know about [Mr. Romney‘s] tax returns? He’s paid his taxes,” Mr. McDonnell said Sunday on CBS's “Face the Nation.” “He’s a very generous man, and he’s made a lot of money because he’s been successful.” The governor added that “people don’t care about Mitt Romney’s tax returns” and accused Democrats of making an issue of Mr. Romney’s tax returns simply to deflect attention from President Obama’s handling of the economy. “Why don’t we start talking about the things that are important?” he said.

Mr. Romney has refused to release more than one year of personal tax returns on the grounds that the information could be distorted and used against him. There is no legal requirement that presidential candidates release their taxes, although it has become the custom in recent decades. In response to Reid's accusations, Mr. Romney told Sean Hannity that Reid needs "to put up or shut up" about the allegations. “Harry, who are your sources?”

Jon Stewart is a partisan Democrat. If even he can’t ignore Reid’s defamation of Romney’s character, then you know just how baseless and reckless they are. Watch Stewart's video:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-august-1-2012/you--harry-reid--are-terrible