Reid: Romney selling snake oil on taxes

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid failed to drag a decade's worth of tax returns from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, but now the Nevada Democrat is back on the offensive.

On Thursday, Reid called Romney a "snake oil" salesman for deceiving Wednesday night debate viewers on the subject of income taxes.

Snake oil?

I'll get to that in a minute.

First the latest Reid diatribe, as circulated by his senate staff:

"For months Mitt Romney has been dishonest about his own taxes, but now he is being dishonest about your taxes. When he was asked to answer for his proposal to give huge breaks to millionaires and billionaires while raising taxes on middle-class Americans, Mitt Romney feigned ignorance and tried to disavow his own tax plan.

"With so much valid concern over the nation's deficit, the American people deserve to know the truth about Mitt Romney's tax plan. Democrats have been clear that we want to cut taxes for American families earning less than $250,000 while asking millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share as part of a balanced plan to reduce our deficit.

"But instead of being honest with Americans about taxes and the deficit, Mitt Romney is peddling snake oil. He seems to think he is entitled to hide the details of his tax plan from the American people, just like he continues to hide his tax returns. But the truth is that Mitt Romney's math just doesn't add up without raising taxes on the middle class."

Now, about that snake oil. Wikipedia notes, "The phrase snake oil is a derogatory term used to describe quackery, the promotion of fraudulent or unproven medical practices. The expression is also applied metaphorically to any product with questionable and/or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, the term "snake oil salesman" may be applied to someone who sells fraudulent goods, or who is a fraud himself."

Perhaps the term floated up from the West in relation to the herb-based medicinal concoctions first created by Chinese laborers. Wiki mentions the "Chinese water snake" as a possible source for the "snake oil" that was later bottled and sold throughout the land s a cure-all for everything from dandruff to fallen arches. More often it was grain alcohol mixed with just about anything else.

Another theory places its origin with the "Seneca oil" that Seneca Indians scooped up from natural the seeps of petroleum they found. They used the substance as a curative. Well, according to Dr. William S. Haubrich's book Medical Meanings (as cited by Wiki), Seneca oil eventually became known as snake oil.

Although the Seneca generally ranged from New York up to Ontario, Canada and played active roles in colonial American history, these days most of the world's snake oil is sold farther south.

In Washington, D.C.