This is a question even senators in his own party are perhaps starting to wonder. To recap: Inquiries into the Senate Majority Leader’s mental state of mind first sprung up when he started rambling incoherently and ad nauseam about Charles and David Koch, and their supposed quest to “buy America,” and continued up through yesterday when the good senator from Nevada actually stated that the border is secure (via Katie Pavlich):
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday asserted the southern border is secure despite the massive surge of illegal minors from Central America that has overwhelmed federal agencies.
“The border is secure,” he told reporters after the Senate Democrats’ weekly policy lunch. “[Sen.] Martin Heinrich [(D-N.M.)] talked to the caucus today. He’s a border state senator. He said he can say without any equivocation the border is secure.”
Assertions such as these fly in the face of what’s actually happening on the ground. But that doesn't matter. A friend of the Senate Majority Leader's (alas, it wasn’t the imaginary one in 2012 who informed him Mitt Romney hadn't paid his taxes in ten years), confirmed “without any equivocation” that the border was secure. Case closed, or so Reid seemed to be suggesting. Let’s move onto more pressing issues, like the Koch brothers.
Not surprisingly, such a jarring statement prompted syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer to wonder aloud last night on Special Report if Harry Reid keeps forgetting to take his medication:
“When you hear Harry Reid saying the border is secure you've got to wonder, you know, whether he's really on his medication or not. I mean, that is so detached from reality. We just saw at the beginning of the show the report from John Roberts -- you get how many we have now? 60,000 -- at least -- kids who come over. And we're completely helpless. And it's the helplessness that I think is driving the president and the Democrats to accept. What they want is for the Republicans to be the one who would propose the change in the law because it looks so cruel.”
That being said, Reid’s too shrewd a politician to believe his own rhetoric, right? He knows that the situation along the US southern border is an unmitigated disaster -- how could he not? – and getting worse by the day. Instead, he chose to peddle a lie with the intended effect of washing away a problem that everyone knows, including himself, must be dealt with sooner or later.
Politics, it can be said, is all about perception, and for Democrats to admit a problem even exists is to also concede they are at least partially to blame for it. And they can’t afford that, now can they?