September 16, 2004

Kitty Kelly's Bush Book Plunges RNC Staffer into Coma

Neurologists Blame Mass Media Saturation Syndrome

Not surprisingly, when release of Kitty Kelly's book about the Bush family drew near, the Republican National Committee excoriated it far and wide. On the day that The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty was released, RNC higher ups decided it might be a good idea if at least one Republican actually read the book, just for the record.

The short straw was drawn by Mindy Lockhart, 23, a native of Muleshoe, Texas, who joined the RNC last spring as an assistant to the assistant director of the George W. Bush Truth Squad. She was handed a $50 bill and told to secretly buy the book as far away from RNC headquarters as possible and hole up in her apartment until she had read it.

When Lockhart's roommate came home at about 6 p.m., she discovered Lockhart unconscious on the couch, the open book on her chest. Paramedics were summoned, and they rushed her to the hospital where a panel of neurologists pronounced her in a coma caused by Mass Media Saturation Syndrome.

The proximate cause: reading Kitty Kelly's book.

Still relatively rare but increasing at a worrisome rate, MMSS is believed to be caused when someone is exposed to too much mass media over a short time. How much media is too much and what length of time is involved is not well understood and appears to vary from case to case.

No preferred treatment for MMSS has emerged yet. Sometimes, the victim regains consciousness in a day or two. In other cases, neurological intervention is required.

A man who fell into a MMSS coma at a movie theater after watching 12 hours of Lord of the Rings films was revived after several days when a doctor whispered in his ear, "Gandalf is alive. Rise and rejoice."

In another case, a Rush Limbaugh fan who accidentally tuned in a public radio station in the middle of a broadcast of All Things Considered fell into a MMSS coma that lasted 30 hours until a neurologist bombarded the patient with an endless stream of old Limbaugh programs.

In both instances, the neurologist was Dr. David Schneiderman of Philadelphia, believed to be the first physician to describe MMSS and give it a name. As luck would have it, one of the neurologists who first treated Lockhart is Dr. Schneiderman's brother-in-law.

After examining Lockhart and learning what she had been doing when she lapsed into the coma, Schneiderman asked to see the Kelly book. The paramedics had marked the page that the book was open to when they lifted it from Lockhart's chest.

After scanning that page and several earlier pages, he leaned close to Lockhart's ear and said: " George W. Bush is the finest president the United States has had since Richard Nixon."

Within an hour, Lockhart had regained consciousness.

Schneiderman declined to say what page Lockhart was reading or what made him compare Bush with Nixon. "Medicine is as much an art as a science," he said.

Lockhart, after a meal of freedom fries, a hamburger and chocolate ice cream, said she can't remember the moment of losing consciousness. But she said she could remember much of what she had read of The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty

"It's a really interesting book. I can't wait to finish it," she said. "What if some of it is true?"

Copyright 2003-2004 William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions
All Rights Reserved
satire | humor | comedy | parody| satirical headlines