Rob Shvern on Politics

Former Senator John Edwards has endorsed Republican frontrunner Senator John McCain and explained ending his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

“As the presidential field narrows,” Sen. Edwards said at an afternoon news conference, “I just didn’t feel there would be room in the race for two white males who favor leniency for illegal aliens, who opposed Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, who fight man-made global warming, who support limits on so-called free speech in political campaigns, who have worked to hinder approval of conservative judicial nominees, and who stand against the Bush administration’s desire to torture terror suspects with waterboarding.”

Mr. Edwards added that, while he’s young enough to run for president 10 more times, the septuagenarian Sen. McCain “may have only five or six more shots at it.”

While Mr. Edwards played down speculation that he might bring balance to the ticket as Sen. McCain’s running mate, he noted that it would be “a once-in-a-lifetime thrill to team up with an actual Vietnam war hero.”

Slowly developing cognitive deficits, as demonstrated so clearly by the President, can represent only one diagnosis, and that is “presenile demential”! Presentile dementia is best described to nonmedical persons as a fairly typical Alzheimer’s situation that develops significantly earlier in life, well before what is usally considered old age. It runs about the same course as typical senile dementias, such as classical Alzheimer’s–to incapacitation and, eventually, death, as with President Ronald Reagan, but at a relatively earlier age, President Bush’s “mangled” words are a demonstration of what physicians call “confabulation,” and are almost specific to the diagnosis of a true dementia. Bush should immediately be given the advantage of a considered professional diagnosis, and started on drugs that offer the possibility of retarding the slow by inexorable course of the disease.

Dr. Joseph M. Price
The Atlantic (October 2004)