If there is one politician in Washington who can claim to be a crappier excuse for a human being that Donald Trump, that man would be Harry Reid.

Harry Reid is a disgusting, cretinous douche who will literally tell any lie that comes to his tiny, demented mind. This is the guy that accused Mitt Romney of failing to file income tax returns. Seriously, can you imagine squeaky-clean Mitt Romney not dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’ in anything? Not me. I was not a Romney supporter in either 2008 or 2012, rather the opposite, but I never had cause to question the man’s basic decency (well, there was the dog on the roof of the car story) or honesty. This is the guy who attacked private citizens engaged in completely legal behavior conducted in an above-board manner of criminality from the floor of the US Senate.

A couple of days ago, the Washington Post humored Reid with a interview that was supposed to be a retrospective of his career and his thoughts, such as they are, about the future. Reid, you see, has decided he’s done all the damage he can do in the Senate and is retiring. It all started in best Harry Reid style with Reid slinging lies.

He said he’s less interested in attacking Trump himself: There are plenty of other people for that. And yet, driving past Trump’s hotel, a resort that does not have a casino, Reid just couldn’t help himself.

“He couldn’t get a license,” Reid said matter-of-factly. “No question about it. Not a chance. I may not be an expert on a lot of stuff, but I’m an expert on gaming licenses. You can’t have filed 14 bankruptcies, cheat people out of stuff. In gaming circles, if somebody does something bad once, you can’t get a gaming license. He’s done something bad his whole life.”

Reid is not exactly correct here. Trump earned a license in 2004, but he hasn’t acted on it. Reid claimed that he has talked to the commissioner, and that if Trump were to try to build one now, he wouldn’t be able to. Not that he’s the type to let the facts get in the way of a good attack anyway: Despite getting pilloried from all sides for claiming without evidence that Romney got away without paying taxes, Reid has no regrets.

“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” he said.

Is there a line he wouldn’t cross when it comes to political warfare?

“I don’t know what that line would be,” he said.

The sickening thing about Harry Reid is that he’s not a psychopath, like Hillary Clinton, who has long since lost the ability to distinguish reality from her rich fantasy life. Harry Reid is a sociopath who tells deliberate and calculated lies to further his goals. In a previous interview, when finally called to task on his calumny of Mitt Romney he said, “He didn’t win, did he?” Where Clinton in Baron von Munchausen, Reid is an ersatz Josef Goebbels.

Bad manners and guttersnipe breeding never quite goes away.

Now the story.

A couple of days ago, Reid was fluffing for Hillary Clinton on the issue of her health.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid took the media to task Tuesday for, in his view, exaggerating Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s recent illness while failing to scrutinize the health of Republican rival Donald Trump.

“She has pneumonia, and … it’s curable, no one denies that,” Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters. “She’s off the campaign trail for a few days. She probably needed the rest anyway. So you folks have magnified the problems she has.”

He then moved on to Trump: “He complains about her health? What does he do? He’s 70 years old. He’s not slim and trim. He brags about eating fast food every day. Look at his health a little bit.”

You have to wonder if Reid knows how old Clinton is or that she and Trump could have been in daycare at the same time.

In best trolling fashion, Reid’s comment was dangled in front of Trump by the Washington Post to see if he’d charge:

Told that Reid had said that Trump is “not slim and trim,” Trump grimaced and waved his hand dismissively.

“Harry Reid? I think he should go back and start working out again with his rubber work-out pieces,” an apparent reference to the exercise band that snapped last year and caused Reid to fall and break a number of ribs and some facial bones.

Reid holds his totally improbable injury story up as a sign of his toughness:

He walked to the SUV gingerly, donning sunglasses and leaning on a silver-tipped cane, his new necessities of the past several months. Early last year, the senator had been exercising in his suburban Las Vegas home when the elastic band he was using snapped in half, whacked him in the face and sent him crashing backward into a set of cabinets. He broke multiple bones in his face and remains blind in his right eye. For three months, he had to sleep sitting up in a chair.

“I was hurt, okay?” he said. “Worse than most people know.” Being laid up gave him time to think. He felt lucky to have been so physically able his whole life, and grateful that he and his wife had their health.

(As an aside, I can tell you from personal experience, having used resistance bands and free weights regularly, for decades, that his story is bullsh** on toast. When a resistance band fails it invariably fails where the band joins the handgrip and, thanks to Sir Isaac Newton, it travels away from the grip, usually downward because in most cases you the middle is anchored with something. And there is no way possible that Reid got that eye injury in the way he described. However, if he was beaten by a mobster or was involved in a drunken punch-up with a family member that is the kind of injury he could easily get.)

On the whole, I think Trump’s response was appropriate and restrained. No sane person should take anything Harry Reid says seriously.

Harry Reid went into a foaming, spittle-flecked, near rabid rage at being dismissed like the insignificant pissant that he is.

“Donald Trump can make fun of the injury that crushed the side of my face and took the sight in my right eye all he wants — I’ve dealt with tougher opponents than him,” Reid said in a statement to POLITICO Thursday night. “I may not be able to see out of my right eye, but with my good eye, I can see that Trump is a man who inherited his money and spent his entire life pretending like he earned it. In Searchlight, we learned a thing or two about hard work that Trump may not have learned at his boarding school.”

…

“Trump rips off working people with scams like Trump University,” Reid said. “And while the people he ripped off suffer, Trump sits at the posh resort he bought with his daddy’s money, with no understanding of the misery he caused. Now, Trump’s business interests in foreign countries and his Ponzi-scheme fraud of a ‘charity’ make clear that Trump intends to scam all of America just like he rips off hard-working people. Trump can insult me all he wants but the American people deserve answers to these questions: Why did Trump appear to use his charity to enrich himself and bribe elected officials who were investigating his scams? Why does Trump refuse to cut ties with business interests that would allow him to exploit American foreign policy to enrich himself? What is Trump hiding in his tax returns?”

He added, “We know how to spot a con artist in Las Vegas. And Donald Trump is a con artist.”

Here is the irony. Just about everything that Reid said about Trump is true. But you could search/replace Trump with Clinton and it would be equally true. In fact, on a less grotesque scale it is even true of Harry Reid. And do you know what? Tens of millions of people know that about Trump and they’ve still decided that he’s a better candidate than Hillary Clinton and, to top it off, they are poised to replace Harry Reid with a Republican.