Dennis Miller blasts Harry Reid.

Dennis Miller’s recent smackdown of Senate party of surrender majority leader Harry Reid is vintage Miller in that it cuts like a knife…and uses rather obscure references.

First, the video.




I took the liberty of researching some of Miller's historical and pop culture annotations.


I’m bemused by the fact that the libs fancy themselves as young idealists who are gonna shake it up, and then they’re forced to fall in behind Dorian Gray’s lighting stand-in.


A reference to the title character in the Oscar Wilde novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.






Yes, Harry Reid’s resemblance to the portrait of Mr. Gray (above) is indeed uncanny.


If it’s possible to make Mr. Limpet sound like Demosthenes, Reid does it every time he opens his ashen piehole and haltingly forces out that tremulous pale-gray oratory that sounds like it’s oozing from a stuck caulking gun.


Mr. Limpet was a character in the 1964 Walt Disney film The Incredible Mr. Limpet. The title character, played by Don Knotts, was a weak, spineless man who was turned into a talking fish.

Demosthenes was a Greek orator back in the 300s B.C.


I think he believes that getting his negative comments in early could be the one chance that a non-entity like he has at a place in history. His is a mediocre man’s Thermopylae.


Thermopylae is another Greek reference, more specifically as it relates to the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BC. An alliance of Greek city-states fought the invading Persian Empire at the pass of Thermopylae in central Greece. The battle is said to have inspired all of Greece to band together against the Persians, and helped usher in the world's first democracy.

It made Miller's rant monologue all the more entertaining once I better understood the notations.

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