George W. Bush is a heartbeat away from having to become president of the United States, a heartbeat that is becoming more and more tenuous.



The heartbeat I am referring to of course is that of Dick Cheney, who has been shouldering the duties of the presidency since its current inception, and whose ticker needed a jump-start early this week in order to resume normal heart rhythm after displaying atrial fibrillation. I would have provided him with my home remedy that involves a motorcycle battery, a pair of alligator clips and two vice-presidential nipples but I wasn�t asked.



While one might easily confuse the two, atrial fibrillation is not the result of the tremendous amount fibbing that President Cheney has been doing lately. It comes instead from eating lots of steak and spending time on the phone making sure one�s constituents are sufficiently wealthy.



Cheney has real cause for concern. He has had four heart attacks, two artery-clearing angioplasties, one quadruple bypass surgery, and an operation to implant a defibrillator that monitors his heartbeat. In July, he had surgery to replace the defibrillator.



This guy makes the Tin Man look like Lance Armstrong. He must have more zippers than George Bush�s airman costume. When Cheney walked toward a senile Joe Garigiola in the sauna last week, Joe said, �Curve ball, I think it�s breaking left.� There�s no real cause to rejoice though, because if acting President Dick Cheney dies, the honor of selecting George W. Bush�s new puppet master would ostensibly fall to Bush himself. Of course the Republican National Committee will make sure he picks the right stooge and then run the show by committee from an undisclosed location in much the same way it has been done for the past seven years. It being much easier to leave things the way they are, however, an elite medical unit was assembled to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.



Once the skeptical surgical team determined that Cheney actually had a heart, they went to work immediately to correct its rhythm. The elite physicians determined that, like many soulless white people, Cheney�s heart was clapping on the one and the three. �Honestly, it was like watching a Debbie Boone concert,� said lead surgeon Kwame Adebayo. �It�s back to normal now.� According to a recent Associated Press report, �The main treatment is to try an electrical shock to restore normal heartbeat. If that doesn�t work, patients may need to take the blood thinner Warfarin to reduce stroke risk.� Let me back up the tape for a second: �If that doesn�t work, patients may need to take the blood thinner Warfarin to reduce stroke risk.� I�m not kidding. The blood thinner that Cheney is taking is called Warfarin. One has to assume that Warfarin was prescribed in Cheney�s case because of his fondness for the apostrophic version of the word.



I can see Cheney turning beet red in his Johnny and stalking the hospital hallway like General George S. Patton addressing his troops. �Warfarin� men have charted the evolution of society since the Mongolian hordes and before. I loves me some warfarin� men. Hannibal! Napoleon! Rommel! Genghis Khan! G-r-r-r-r-r-r-r! Churchill! G-r-r-r-r-r-r! Charlemagne! Mao Tse-Tung!! Hitl � um, all of the great warriors!!!� I imagine the Nurse Ratchet version of the hospital staff at the D.C. hospital of choice suffering Cheney�s tirade, but indeed topping off his syringe just a little more than the other patients.



�Where�s that Warfarin? Make mine a double dose! Make my blood so thin I have no conscience at all! Wait, it�s too late for that. Whatever, never mind. G-r-r-r-r-r-r! See how unwittingly aware I can be? R-r-r-a-a-r-r-r! G-r-r-r-r-r!! R-a-a-o-o-w-w-w!!! Let�s fare some war! Let�s war some fare! Let�s fare some unfair warfare! G-r-r-r-r-r!!!� You could say that Cheney was using Warfarin as a preemptive stroke. After all, he�s done very similar things before with warfarin�, why not with Warfarin? He has bumbled into sovereign nations armed with faulty intelligence and warfarin�, and achieved results that are the opposite of the intention. Hopefully his current strategy will have equally catastrophic results with Warfarin, and subsequent to the giddily anticipated final heart attack, people won�t be fooled by the robot with the Cheney carcass over it that the RNC would attempt before ceding even the vice presidency to anyone who wasn�t already a shill for the corporatocracy. Best wishes to the veep�s family, but I submit this devil to the ghoul pool; the rest of the world would benefit by his absence.