Perhaps worst of all was when Obama’s right-hand man in the Senate, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, used the floor of Congress’s upper chamber to spread a malicious lie accusing Romney of being a tax cheat. The slander was, of course, spread far and wide by Obama surrogates. Years later, well after Obama secured his reelection bid, Reid all but admitted to concocting tax smear from thin air.

In terms of dirty political tactics in, say, the last 40 years of American politics, what is the GOP equivalent of the Democratic Senate majority leader using the floor of the U.S. Senate to promote a political smear?

The Obama campaign portrayed Romney in 2012 as an irredeemable bigot whose victory would lead to the enslavement of minorities and the sexual subjugation of women. When Democrats were not actively participating in the total destruction of Romney, who was just as decent then as he is now, they watched silently as it happened to a man they knew not to be a villain. And this is to say nothing of the pro-Obama forces in the news and entertainment industries, many of whom slandered the senator mercilessly in 2012 with a variety of lies and trumped-up scandals, including nonsense about “binders full of women” and Seamus the Romney family dog.