“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good disposition.” –Thomas Jefferson (1785)

Barack Hussein Obama’s leftist cabal, desperately trying to avoid any discussion of its failed socialist economic policies, recently returned to its reliable “classism” playbook for a diversionary “tax fairness” challenge.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) cowardly slandered from the Senate floor – where he is constitutionally immune from prosecution for false statements – that he has heard from a “Bain Capital investor” that Mitt Romney paid no taxes in the last 10 years. Reid and other partisans are now attempting to obtain Romney’s tax returns for those years so Leftists can read the worst into what are undoubtedly very complex tax filings.

“Obviously he can’t release those tax returns,” Reid declared. “How would it look? … I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.”

“How would it look?” Answer: However the Democrats and their Leftmedia lemmings want it to look.

Challenged to reveal his source for this accusation, Reid responded, “I am not basing this on some figment of my imagination. I have had a number of people tell me that. That’s the best you’re going to get from me. … I don’t think the burden should be on me. The burden should be on him. He’s the one I’ve alleged has not paid any taxes. Why didn’t he release his tax returns?”

A few days later and again from the Senate floor, coward Reid proclaimed, “So, the word’s out that he hasn’t paid any taxes for 10 years. Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”

Columnist Arnold Ahlert observes, “Note the despicable tactic to which Harry Reid has resorted. He makes an unsubstantiated allegation – one that could be made about virtually anything – and then claims the burden is on Romney to prove that the allegation is untrue.”

So, if I claimed someone told me that Harry Reid moonlights as a transvestite Marilyn Monroe impersonator in Vegas, by Reid’s distorted proof standard, the burden is on him to prove otherwise.

Ahlert concludes, “This is the stuff of banana republics and totalitarian regimes, but the Senate Majority Leader does it anyway, knowing that his media allies are more than willing to keep the story alive, and that other Democrats will rally to his side.”

And, they did, of course.

House Minority Leader Pelosi asserted, “Harry Reid made a statement that is true. Somebody told him. It is a fact. Whether he did or not can easily be disposed of: Mitt Romney can release his tax returns and show whether he paid taxes.”

Please note the verbal gymnastics coward Pelosi must perform for her to avoid prosecution for slander. Yes, Reid might have made a “statement that is true” – it’s just not this one. Yes, “somebody told him” – something about anything at any time. And, yes, releasing Romney’s tax returns would definitely dispose of Leftist demands that Romney release his tax returns. However, none of these statements directly repeats Reid’s slanderous allegation.

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz also received the Leftist memo: “I do know that Mitt Romney could clear this up in 10 seconds by releasing the 23 years of tax returns that he gave to John McCain when he was being vetted for vice president.”

Like Pelosi, to avoid prosecution coward Schultz does not directly restate Reid’s slanderous allegation.

For the record, Mitt Romney has released tax returns for the last two years, but hypocritically Reid, Pelosi and Wasserman have refused to release their tax records, which might shed light upon how they have increased their net worth by tens of millions of dollars while in Congress.

Of course, this classist playbook challenge emanates directly from Barack Hussein Obama himself, the grand wizard of the politics of disparity. When his White House mouthpiece Jay Carney was asked about Reid’s cowardly ploy, he insisted that Reid “speaks for himself.” Then Carney proceeded to restate the challenge: “You know, [releasing private information isn’t] every candidate’s favorite part of the process, but it’s a tradition that’s important. It’s valuable to the American people as they decide who should be president.”

WAIT – take a moment to ponder that last comment. The release of private information by a presidential candidate “is valuable to the American people as they decide who should be president.”

OK.

That’s a rather bold statement for a guy who’s boss didn’t release even his birth certificate until three years after he was elected president, and then what was finally released wasn’t the original long-form 1961 Hawaiian birth certificate. Of course, Obama has used the birth certificate issue to masterfully divert an incalculable amount of conservative political capital – capital that should have been invested in far more relevant questions about his socialist ideology.

Moreover, there’s a long list of documents, “valuable to the American people as they decide who should be president,” which I still want Obama to release.

I want to see records regarding his repatriation when he returned from Indonesia; name change from Barry Sotero to Barack Hussein Obama; Punahou School, Occidental College and Columbia University (all three of which could show he illegally applied for aid as a foreign student, among other things); Columbia senior thesis; Harvard Law School; years in the Illinois State Senate; membership in the Illinois State Bar Association; medical; and, finally, his passport and visa records.

Obama has refused to release any of these files, and has paid millions of dollars in legal fees to suppress them. Any one of them would likely provide plenty of evidence to raise questions about Obama’s qualifications to run for president of the United States – or to be re-elected to that post.

For example, let’s focus on just one of the sets that Obama refuses to release – his Columbia records. A Columbia class of ‘83 colleague, author and former Libertarian Party vice-presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root, says he never saw or heard of Obama even though they were in the same political science and pre-law program. He also says that if Obama’s Columbia records were released, one might find that he “attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student and paid little [tuition for Columbia] or Harvard Law School because he illegally applied for foreign aid.”

Adding to the Obama enigma, a Wall Street Journal report filed back when Obama was a candidate, “Obama’s Lost Years,” noted that “some 400 of his classmates [were randomly contacted] but no one … remembered him.”

What we do know about Obama is that he had a tragic young life, despite his official White House bio that begins, “His story is the American story – values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family…” We know Obama was a disciple of hate and mentored by Marxists.

What we also know is that the combination of these factors adds up to a case study in Narcissistic Personality Disorder – a very dangerous pathological condition particularly for anyone in a position of power.

The bottom line is that in the first presidential debate, when Obama challenges Romney to release his tax records, Romney should respond with a long list of sealed files that Obama should release. After all, didn’t Obama claim, immediately upon taking office, that his administration would be “the most open and transparent in history”?

In regard to Reid’s cowardly classist play, at least one noted Democrat has shown enough integrity to call it what it is.

David Rothkopf, CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group (publishers of Foreign Policy Magazine), declared, “I have voted Democrat all my life. I served in the Clinton administration and worked for a Democratic congressman on Capitol Hill. I deplore these tactics. When Harry Reid goes on the floor of the Senate and makes assertions like he did, he demeans the institution. As my old boss, the late Ron Brown, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, used to say, 'You can’t be for jobs and against the people who create them.’ Every time you hear a politician sling mud at an opponent rather than addressing a real issue, recognize that you’re the one being dissed. Then do us all a favor and vote your anger.”