The Mystery That Died With President Hugo Chavez

By now, you’re probably aware of Todd Akin’s ridiculous comments on how the body shuts down during rape, and you may even have heard about other wackjobs trying to defend Akin’s comments. So it’s easy enough to just pass this off as these being men who don’t understand the female body, and we’ll let them sit and not get re-elected.

I’d have liked to have been more timely with this, but with the recent passing of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, we’ve got a new mystery on our hands. When Chavez died on March 5th of cancer, Vice President Nicolas Maduro immediately came out and claimed that Chavez’s cancer was induced by his enemies, calling it a direct attack.

Ok, we can’t just chalk that one up to not understanding the other gender’s parts — everyone knows that you can’t just sneeze on someone and give them cancer. It’s one of those things that would require actually forcibly injecting cancer cells into the man or something, and we’re pretty sure that the guy who’s basically run Venezuela on his own for the last decade and a half is going to be better protected than that — and he’s done some crazy stuff. The scary thing is, this whole “cancer attack” wasn’t Maduro’s idea; it was actually something President Chavez came up with himself. Or so you would think — apparently Fidel Castro and even Bob Marley had the same thoughts.

Last year, while undergoing chemo treatments, President Chavez started noticing that a lot of his heads-of-state were getting cancers of various types. And naturally, once he started noticing this trend, the first logical conclusion was “We’re under attack!” In fact, a couple of Air Force members were sent back to America recently for just that reason. Colonel David Delmonaco and another unnamed military man were accused of being the ones to “give” President Chavez his cancer in the first place, and damned if they were going to put a hit out on anyone else.

Let’s ignore for a minute all of the same stuff that Chavez and Maduro did about this cancer trend, like how they work with a bunch of older guys (statistics show they’re pretty eligible for prostate cancer just because they’re men) who probably smoke a lot of fine cigars (leading to all kinds of cancers) and probably don’t maintain great diets (these are rich old men we’re talking about).

What if America has actually weaponized cancer?

The first implication we need to look at is that if we’ve figured out how to weaponize cancer, we’ve got to come up with some sort of better treatment than what’s available at our hospitals right now. No researcher is going to invent a way to spread cancer all over the place if he can’t cure himself in case of an accident. And we’d like to think that a “cure” for any kind of cancer would’ve gone public, if this were the case.

Next, we’d have to take a look at how this weaponized cancer would be spread. Would it be distributed through the air? No, that wouldn’t work. It’d probably get too diluted, and it’d also probably kill way more people than necessary and would really be suspicious. Water supply? Same thing. Food? Could work, but it’d be difficult because people have a tendency to avoid food that’s got tumor-looking things on it.

Finally, the whole idea of giving someone cancer as a way to assassinate them doesn’t make a ton of sense. As evidenced by the whole Bin Laden deal (and even his #2′s), when America needs to take out a dangerous leader, or any of his underlings, they just go right out and do it. Cancer takes time to kill people and is regularly treatable. Simply put, giving someone cancer as a means to take out a hit is the efficiency equivalent of trying to inflate a car tire by blowing into it.

So everyone who’s made the “someone gave me cancer” claim so far is now dead, and we have no real way to verify if that’s a possibility. Clearly Chavez, being in such a position of power, knew something we all didn’t. And unfortunately, he will now take that knowledge with him. Here’s hoping that the next time anyone figures out a stupid way to weaponize a terrible disease, they pick a better disease and then keep that information to themselves.