HIS TIME? McCain (Photo: Getty Images)
Though his years as a hot-shot fighter pilot may be well behind him, straight talk expressionist John McCain can't keep off the highway to the danger zone. The AP is reporting that the Arizona senator will be visiting troops in Iraq during the Thanksgiving holiday—news that comes on the heels of McCain's declaration over the weekend that he'll be foregoing Secret Service protection as both a candidate and, if elected, president.

Hear that, thugs? That's a full week you have to plan, buy bullets, clean guns, whatever.

McCain of course isn't the only candidate to drop into the hot landing zone of Iraq (though, notably, John Edwards, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani have never been there). And he's not even the first 2008 candidate to refuse Secret Service protection (that honor belongs to Radar also-ran candidate Jonathon the Impaler). But when you consider that this will be McCain's seventh trip to Iraq, and that the Impaler is blowing off the Secret Service only because he has his own regiment of vampires to ensure his security, it's only natural to question if McCain has something of a death wish. Another possibility, however, is that McCain simply knows he has the best bodyguard in the world: God.

According to McCain's biographer, it's a scenario that the Arizona senator has long entertained. In The Nightingale's Song, author Robert Timberg details several brushes with death experienced by a young McCain even prior to his now-famous POW days, including a tragic aircraft carrier accident, which McCain survived by butt-rolling through a massive fireball. According to Timberg, McCain's survival of these incidents "made him wonder if he had been spared for a reason. God, with whom he maintained a cordial if casual relationship, seemed reluctant to kill him."

These thoughts occurred to McCain before he miraculously endured five and a half years of brutality in a Vietnamese prison camp, a bout with melanoma, and an utterly devastating, well-reported sweater scandal, leaving us with seemingly incontrovertible proof that McCain indeed has the Big Guy on his side. And maybe even a hot lead as to who exactly is making those nasty phone calls in New Hampshire about Romno-bot's weirdo religious faith.