The New York Times had its resident medical doctor reporter examine all the available medical records of all the candidates for president and vice president. The only problem is that none of the campaigns would turn over any records! But, you know, Barack Obama seems healthy enough, besides the smoking. And Sarah Palin didn't release any records at all, not even about her crazy "giving birth en route from Texas to Alaska" thing, but they only devote like one paragraph to that. Because the point of the story is to let you know that John McCain is an old, sick man. He has all the cancers, everywhere, all over his face. Breaking! Ok, sure, McCain's doctors say he's pretty much recovered from his skin cancer, and the chance of it recurring during his first term, say, is like 10%. But they are maybe not letting us know how serious the last bout of melanoma was!

In interviews, several melanoma experts questioned why the Mayo Clinic doctors had performed such extensive surgery, because the operation was usually reserved for treatment of Stage III melanoma, not Stage IIA. On Aug. 18, 2000, the day before Mr. McCain’s operation, his surgeon, Dr. Michael L. Hinni, wrote in the records that he planned to do the extensive operation because of the size and location of Mr. McCain’s melanoma. In the teleconference in May 2008, Dr. Hinni explained that because the melanoma was two centimeters across he had to make “a 6-by-6-centimeter island of skin, a fairly sizable wound” to remove it. If Mr. McCain’s 2000 left-temple melanoma was a metastasis, as the Armed Forces pathologists’ report suggested, it would be classified as Stage III. The reclassification would change his statistical odds for survival at 10 years from about 60 percent to 36 percent, according to a published study.

Uh oh! And: "If the patient was the president, the location of a recurrence and its treatment could raise the need to invoke the 25th Amendment, elevating the vice president to president, at least temporarily." That is terrifying, right? Oh and also, back in 2000, when McCain did allow people to talk to his doctors and stuff, everyone learned that he tried to kill himself when he was at the Hanoi Hilton:

The records mentioned that in 1968, about eight months after his capture and after some particularly brutal beatings from his North Vietnamese captors, Mr. McCain attempted suicide, trying to hang himself with his shirt. The records and his doctors, whom I interviewed with the senator’s permission in 1999, said he had never been given a diagnosis of a mental health disorder or treated at the project’s center for a mental health disorder.

Is any of this relevant? Is it fair game? The Times hides behind the excuse that it asked all the campaigns for health information, and also brings up the Eagleton shock treatment thing. Honestly everyone should know McCain's chances of surviving eight years in office, especially now that he's picked a lunatic as his Veep. That doesn't really change the fact that there's no story here! His cancer is maybe a little worse than he claims, maybe. Great work.