NYT - McCain Addicted To...Cancer!

The New York Times have crystallized their strategy towards Republican nominee Senator John McCain (R-Az): if you can't smear him or get him to blow his top, kill him. Problem solved.

The 71 year old senator might seem as tough as a windswept craggy outcrop somewhere off the coast of Maine but, take it from the Times, he's DYING! Yes, Goddammit, dying, I tell you. If we elect him we're all doomed. Doomed. He's not immortal as his campaign have declared him to be from the beginning. How often have we all been suckered by those McCain flyers, posters, robocalls and ads declaring "Vote for McCain. He doesn't get sick. He'll NEVER die!" It was all a cunning ploy, my friends. John McCain, I weep even as I write this, will die. The day will come when he will draw his last breath, cease to be, shift off the mortal coil, as it were, become one with the ages. But that's not the worst part. There's more. Not only will he die but we don't even know when! It could be today, tomorrow, next week. Next year, maybe. Twenty seven months, 3 weeks and nine days from now. Or, perhaps, he'll break the century marker. We just don't know.

The NYT, famed the world over for its fearless, scrupulously fair-minded, no-holds-barred investigative reporting, tears off the mask of indestructibility behind which McCain has cowered until now to reveal the frail disease-riddled palsied reality that is this, alas, mere mortal man. Lawrence K. Altman of the Times is an M.D. and his trained medical eye noticed a bulge in the Senator's left cheek which had seemed to us laypersons merely a wad of chewing 'baccy to which McCain, being a Republican, was, among other loathsome right-wing habits, obviously addicted. The Doc probed further and discovered that instead of tobacco the Republican candidate is addicted to cancer! "Mr. McCain," he tells us ominously, "has had four melanomas." Count them. Shoulder (1993). Left arm, nose (2002). Temple (2000). Yup. Four. They were all surgically removed (the cool insider lingo is "excised", Latin for "cut out"). Only one was "serious", the lesion on his left temple. The surgery left the patient with the 'baccy bulge' the Doc so cunningly picked up on. McCain has been given the all clear in subsequent check ups.

Dr. Altman is still worried, very worried. After all we're talking a Republican candidate here with a real shot and the guaranteed cancer-proof Dems in disarray. All is not lost, thank Fidel. The Doc prognosticates that if someone survives the first five years (Mac is now seven years and counting) "the probability of recurrence during the [following] five years was 14 percent and death 9 percent, a study published in 1992 found". Yes indeed. Death. Say it slowly. Roll it upon the tongue. Savor its dismal delights. Death. Ah, yes, "easeful Death" in John (Note the same Christian name and he died too. Just a coincidence?) Keats' felicitous phrase. Ask not for whom the bell tolls 91 percent of the time, for the remaining absolutely vital 9 percent it tolls for...well, for someone, that's for sure, and it could be John McCain, who knows?

Voters, you have been warned. Elect John McCain at your peril. He will die sometime somewhere of something. Lawrence the Physician invites us by implication to imagine that when the dread phone rings in the White House at 3 am the War Hero President will raise it to his lips and drop dead on the spot of a veritable cascade of melanomas that were queuing up all these years waiting for their chance to pounce! Truly a jihad of skin cancers will carry off the Great Man.

But wait! The Vice President will take his place toute de suite . Another Republican! By the Beard of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, there's no end to them. Hope however is at hand. At the subdued swearing in the very next day a reporter from the Times notices that the new President has a slight cough...