The conservative blogosphere has been trying to figure out how Harry Reid injured his eye, since the 75-year-old Senate majority leader’s claim that he fell while exercising is clearly just a cover story. Earlier this month, blogger John Hinderaker reported that a source, Easton Elliott, told him that Reid’s brother Larry showed up drunk to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on New Year’s Eve and admitted that he’d beaten up a relative. As the story spread online, Elliott appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show and chatted off-air with Rush Limbaugh, but now he tells the Las Vegas Sun that he made the whole thing up. His real name is Larry Pfeifer, and he just wanted to make a point about the lack of journalistic standards in certain partisan media outlets. “It was just so outrageous,” he said. “The fact that someone can say something completely false that can destroy somebody’s life, it’s just wrong. Where’s the moral compass?” He makes a great point — and, more important, this basically confirms that Reid was smacked around for sassing some mobsters.
