BY DANIEL MELTZER | Medical hot lines across the country and around the globe remained silent today after physicians in the nation’s capital sent out an emergency call for a willing donor or donors to step forward to contribute his or her brain as well as an entire backbone to the Democratic Party.
“The patient is a virtual jellyfish…,” Dr. Alvin Zweistein, chief of osteoneuropathology at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, told reporters today at a news conference, “…completely immobilized and unable to communicate comprehensibly, to stand up for, or to, anything, and only occasionally being heard to mumble, sotto voce as it were, such utterances as, ‘Oh, well…’ and ‘With all due respect…’ and ‘Being in the minority in the House, after all… .’
“Response to external stimuli is nil. The patient does occasionally twitch on its slightly more reactive right side,” an unnamed hospital staff person told this reporter. However, the significance, if any, of these apparently random, spontaneous spasms remains unclear.
“The patient is currently on life support and its ultimate survival is by no means assured,” Zweistein added, nervously gnawing his stethoscope.
This may, in fact, be the first identified case of an entire political party having been stricken with this paralytic condition, for which the only known hope would be the double transplant, which has never been performed before and is as yet even to be considered by the Health Department. Yet, without it, and soon, he added, the likelihood of full recovery of a patient with severely atrophied brain and spine would be negligible, Zweistein estimated.
In one earlier isolated individual case of such multiple neurological paralyses, he said, nearly full function did return without surgery. However, the unnamed patient reportedly went on to exhibit extreme megalomania, compounded with severe communicative difficulties characterized by progressive retardation of grammatical skills and pronounced pronunciation difficulties with his own native tongue. The patient, believed to have been former President George W. Bush, stricken while reading the illustrated book “The Pet Goat” to elementary school children in Florida, later credited divine intervention with his recovery.
Just who might step forward to offer both a brain and a full backbone to the seemingly mindless, spineless Party remains subject to speculation.
Observers had been sounding alarms for years regarding the Party’s noticeable twitching and listing to starboard. It was only a matter of time, many felt, before it literally fell over onto its face.
“We are clearly in a state of emergency,” one loyal Party supporter, who declined to be identified for this report, declared. “Look at us. It’s pathetic.”
Owing to a mounting burden of weighty national maladies, including a costly, and seemingly permanent, state of war, a debilitating congressional climate that is both toxic and near the melting point, as it remains, both houses fester in a stagnant cloud of hot air, amid hemorrhaging federal budgets, ballooning unemployment and electronic bug infestation. The collapse of the Party’s central nervous system, including its head, has many now seriously alarmed.
A nationwide debate is being called for on whether the patient should be allowed to die a peaceful death or be kept on artificial life support, introducing an entire new dimension involving the still unresolved and highly divisive issue of euthanasia, over which the Religious Right and the so called Liberal Left have grappled for decades.
“Time will tell,” one Pentagon official familiar with conflicts on a variety of battlegrounds concluded, “but only if it is tortured.”
