White House Medical Emergency

Paging Dr. Bill Frist! The services of the nation’s foremost authority on brain-death are urgently required in the Oval Office.

Dr. Frist who, as Senate Majority Leader in 2005 diagnosed Terri Schiavo and detected signs of mental activity that had eluded all other physicians, should be called on to study George Bush’s apparent failure to recover from sedation for his colonoscopy last weekend.

What makes the condition dire is that, unlike Schiavo who lapsed into a seeming coma, the President is ostensibly awake but functioning in a trance-like condition that involves mindless repetition of automatic mantras.

The latest manifestation yesterday was particularly alarming as Mr. Bush sleep-spoke at the Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina.

“It’s hard to argue that Al Qaeda in Iraq,” the President intoned, “is separate from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda when the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq took an oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden.”

This incantatory repetition of Al Qaeda and bin Laden is a classic symptom of a thinking disorder that should be examined by a specialist like Dr. Frist, who discovered hope for Ms. Schiavo by studying videos of her.

The nation can only pray the President’s condition does not deteriorate to the point that Vice President Cheney, suffering as he does from intermittent rage attacks, has to summon the strength to take over White House responsibilities on a continuing basis.