Although this race is much, much closer than a lot of us feel comfortable with, There have been many times that I have shaken my head in wonder at the unforced fouls that the McCain campaign has made these past 2-3 months. Palin first, a great many head-shaking gaffes, and now the near-incoherent attempt to "suspend" his campaign along with the debates. After reading a post on Americablog, I have come to a horrifying possibility: McCain may have a Metastatic tumor in the right hemisphere of his brain.
This train of thought started with seeing the post on Americablog pointing out something that was wrong with his left eye. The sudden lack of movement with one side of the face, sometimes called "drop" can be a symptom of pressure on the opposite side hemisphere of the brain, or in this case the right hemisphere.
McCain's history with melanoma is widely known, with a malignant melanoma 2.2 cm deep being removed from his face in August of 2000 At that level of depth, it is a Stage II melanoma, with a 40-85% survival rate.
Looking up the symptoms of Right Hemisphere Brain Damage, it sounds a lot like the flailing that has been going on in the McCain campaign these past few months.
Right hemisphere brain damage is damage to the right side of the brain. The brain is made up of two sides, or hemispheres. Each hemisphere is responsible for different body functions and skills. In most people, the left side of the brain contains the person's language centers. The right side controls cognitive functioning (thinking skills).
Damage to the right hemisphere of the brain leads to cognitive-communication problems, such as impaired memory, attention problems and poor reasoning. In many cases, the person with right brain damage is not aware of the problems that he or she is experiencing (anosognosia).
The article on brain damage goes on to list eight areas of disability, three of which would explain some of the extreme wierdness coming from McCain.
Attention: difficulty concentrating on a task and paying attention for more than a few minutes at a time. Doing more than one thing at a time may be difficult or impossible.
This would easily explain his lack of "multi-tasking" this weekend in suspending his campaign.
Left-side neglect: a form of attention deficit. Essentially, the individual no longer acknowledges the left side of his/her body or space. These individuals will not brush the left side of their hair, for example, or eat food on the left side of their plate, as they do not see them or look for them. Reading is also affected as the individual does not read the words on the left side of the page, starting only from the middle.
This is symptom is explained from the drop on the left side of his face
Memory: problems remembering information, such as street names or important dates, and learning new information easily.
Shiite vs Sunni anyone?
Finally, if he was being impaired by a tumor, this would also explain both the isolating him from his press pool (once other symptoms got to obvious to manage), and the current gyrations to keep him from debating Barak Obama in an uncontrolled setting.
The Palin-worshipers may be closer to the truth than they think.