How is anyone suppose to know what car they are riding in if they don't drive it, pump the gas, or write the check for the payment?  This is just more of the same, trying to say McCain is out of touch with the other kept men with multiple homes running for President.

Like how was it fair that George HW Bush didn't know what a supermarket scanner was, when he hadn't been shopping in like 30 years? :)

He seems to have difficulty telling them from common objects such as a hole in the ground.

BTW, whenever McCain goes to ground, as he did today, I always wonder if there is a medical reason. (Yeah, I know that Obama is in Chicago today and has no campaign events, but he is obviously getting cranked up for the VP rollout tomorrow and the convention next week.)

McCain seemed to me to be unusually energetic at Rick Warren's faith forum last weekend. It must be difficult for McCain's handlers to calibrate his rest and his meds to get him to perform up to that level on occasion. McCain obviously can't sustain that level for long.

McCain normally takes every weekend off at one of his residences, normally at the ranch in Arizona. Is he perhaps receiving some kind of medical treatment (chemotherapy?) on a weekly basis at the Mayo Clinic facility in Scottsdale, AZ? It might be a good place for a journalistic stakeout.

One thing we can be certain about: McCain's handlers will do their best to shield him from any reporters' unfiltered questions for the next two months. McCain has been making a gaffe or even a strategic blunder virtually every day, and only now has Team Obama finally started taking advantage of the huge openings.

Today's "Country Club Economics" ad with McCain and Bush Sr. in the golf cart was perfectly brutal. Well done, Team Obama.

Here's a link to a fascinating article about McCain and melanoma.

http://www.counterpunch.org/mc...

I don't know how accurate it is, but the author sure is passionate.

that is especially worrying: according to this Harvard Medical School link, melanoma patients have a high risk of developing brain tumors:

More than fifty percent of patients with melanoma develop brain metastases; that type of cancer has the highest brain metastasis incidence rate.... The interval between initial diagnosis and central nervous system involvement may be long; people with melanoma should see their doctors regularly for follow-up exams. Metastatic brain tumors are most frequently multiple in number (about seventy-five percent of the time), and are associated with a high incidence of seizures (twenty-five to thirty-seven percent of people).

Could McCain's increasingly frequent episodes of confusion reflect the existence of such brain metastases? Could some of his "blankouts" on the campaign trail in fact be mini-seizures?

Can any M.D.'s out there comment?

(and I've been wondering about this) if the nominee becomes too ill to finish his campaign? I'm not being ghoulish nor suggesting that I have any desire for such an event, but what would his political party do in such case?  Any precedents?

Have you seen that movie 'Weekend at Bernies'?

I'd be surprised if there were even any party rules on the subject. The only remotely similar case that I can recall is George McGovern's dumping of Thomas Eagleton as his VP in 1972 when it became public that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy to treat depression. McGovern fumbled that crisis and made himself vulnerable to the charge of being indecisive.

If McCain were to have a health crisis in the next two months, my guess is that the Republican response would be to prop the old guy up for a photo op or a brief campaign stop for a few minutes a day and to deny the existence of any problem. Brezhnev's handlers were able to do this for years in the Soviet Union, as were the senescent Mao's handlers in China. FDR's handlers did the same in the last few months of FDR's life. (Remember that awful photo of FDR with Stalin and Churchill at the Yalta Conference in February, 1945, two months before he died?)

If McCain is utterly incapacitated and cannot even be propped up for a few minutes of daily video coverage on the campaign trail, the Republicans are left with the dilemma: (1) pressure McCain to resign and have the VP candidate (I'm betting on Portman) take over as the Republican nominee with a VP candidate chosen for him by the party elders or (2) carry on with the existing ticket with the public assertion that McCain is only temporarily indisposed and will surely recover. The public might just be gullible enough to believe it.

Your guess is as good as mine.