Is John McCain Dying of Cancer?

I just got back from a dermatologist for a check-up (growing up in Miami with outdoor summers requires this), and I asked her about McCain and skin cancer.  He's had various types of the disease and I wanted to get a sense of whether he's really in danger or if this is one of those treatable forms of cancer.  And she told me that basically, some skin cancers are not that bad, but malignant melanoma - the kind McCain has had in two separate places - is not one of those.  It's bad.  Real bad.  And unlike most cancers, it doesn't really go away, even after years in remission.  Sam Donaldson had it on his ankle, and thirteen years later it returned in the same spot.  McCain has had it on two separate 'primaries' (not recurrences, which aren't as bad), and you can clearly see the post-surgical scars of having his lymph nodes checked (and partially removed).  This is not a healthy guy, this is a 72 year old man with a fairly high likelihood of serious illness and death within the next few years.


I asked Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican, about John McCain's cancer, and he said that McCain is in remission.  The video is above.  You can see above that Kyl is taken aback, but he says that he trusts what John McCain told him.  But why?  That might be good enough for a Republican Senator, but why should that be the test for the voters?  Why should we trust McCain on his medical past?  It's not just that McCain has stretched the truth in this campaign, as even Karl Rove noted, or that he's acted as desperately as you'd expect a dying man to act when stretching for his lifelong dream of the Presidency, it's that McCain has simply refused to release his medical records to the public and confined select members of the press to a three hour window with no electronic equipment to examine his records.  Brave New Films is on this question, and more than a thousand doctors have signed up to ask him to release his medical records.  You should sign this petition and watch the video, it is downright scary.  While this race is between Obama and McCain, President Palin is not an unlikely outcome (as Matt Damon noted).