Is Sen. Reid physically up to the job?

I said it this summer and I'll say it again. Something's wrong with Sen. Harry Reid.

Nevadans have noticed all year that Sen. Reid gets an extra assist on the elbow from staff as he sits down for dinner affairs. People have also noticed Sen. Reid's inability to carry on a focused conversation at functions. He often appears scattered in normal conversation, confusing words and titles.

Remember in the debate with Sharron Angle, he mixed up the Department of Energy with the Department of Education. He bungled his closing argument by misplacing his notes for several painful seconds. Half his sentences were incomplete. Sharron Angle told him to "man-up" and he had no retort. He talked about professional baseball players wearing pink shoes. He pointed to his shoulders and talked about football players wearing pink football helmets during Breast Cancer Awareness month. Of course, there are no pink helmets in any college or pro football, though there are pink symbols, pink shoes and pink gloves.

Add that to his now famous gaffes -- calling a senate candidate "his pet", calling a women senator "hot", saying that loosing 36,000 jobs in a week was "really good", and last week comparing us and the bad economy to the Chilean miners (I'll write more about that strange analogy this Sunday in the Review-Journal and, as always, I'll appreciate your readership). Now he utters this on a political TV show:

'But for me we'd be in a world-wide depression".

What? This is only days before the election of his life. He brags that he personally saved the world from depression.

Where did he think he was -- the Stephen Colbert show?

I'm telling you, something's wrong with Sen. Reid and I think it stems from his mini-stroke in 2005. Remember, he hid that event from the public for several days. And when his staff finally came clean and made public his hospitalization, they said Sen. Reid was A-OK and the doctors said he needed no further follow-up.

That's just not believable. A mini-stroke is no small matter and no doctor would release him after four days in the hospital without so much as a follow-up. BTW: The Reid staff would not make available, or disclose the name of the Las Vegas doctor that treated him.

Reid has not mounted much of a physically demanding campaign in Nevada until recently. He has not personally visited every part of the state. When he's on the go all day, he looks tired. Evening events without rest are a strain, it appears to me. I think that's one of the reasons he performed so poorly in his debate with Angle. He was out all day at the opening of the Hoover Dam bypass bridge. While neither candidate will ever get confused with Lincoln or Douglas, Angle mopped the floor with Reid that night. A grandmother from Reno made the majority leader of the U.S. Senate look like a rummy drug in from the street. What's up with that?

This is an important election. Should we give Sen. Reid, 70, another six years, or not. Seems to me given Sen. Reid's very strange behavior, he ought to publicly assure Nevadans that health-wise he is, in fact, up for the job. He might start with making available the doctor who treated him in 2005.