How old is Cheney?

From The Huffington Post:

Dear Oracle:

How do they keep Vice President Cheney alive? Isn't he like 500 years old, or something?

- Denzel Boone, Cooter, Missouri

Dear Denzel:

Your curiosity is not unusual – I've received more letters on this topic in the past year than any other, asking about rumors linking the Vice President to ancient "blood cults," and to prehistoric extinctions blamed in native legend on the "Cha-uh-Nay," a malevolent wind spirit that "set upon the mammoth beasts and devoured them where they stood, so their bones shivered whitely for a moment amidst the meat bees, then rattled to the dirt."

The truth is, Vice President Cheney's exact age is unknown because his father never married his mother. Technically, this makes him a "bastard" – though of course we all know him to be above reproach, the sober Wally Cleaver to President Bush's mischievous Eddie Haskell – and in the unforgiving frontier days when he was born, bastard births were not recorded. (Estimates of the Vice President's age, by an informal panel of experts assembled last night at Gurke's G Spot, a nearby lounge, ranged from 130 to 165.)

We do know that Mr. Cheney was born in what became the Wyoming Territory, to a woman called Deadeye Daisy Cheney, who rose from "varmint plinker" (exterminating prairie dogs with a slingshot) to run a chain of mixed-meat jerky stands along the route of the transcontinental railroad. It was only his mother's hard work and sacrifice that saved Mr. Cheney from the typical fate of a bastard, cleaning spittoons or geeking for medicine shows.

How is the Vice President kept alive through all his heart attacks and other ailments?
With fresh organs from the War on Terror.

The organs are harvested from dying insurgents and terrorists, then flown fresh daily from the Middle East to a secret medical facility in Virginia. There, in a former intensive-care nursery, rows of cribs hold hearts, spleens, livers, etc., ready for implantation.

(Organs not used within 72 hours are picked up by licensed meat scavengers for sale to rendering plants up and down Interstate 95. Coincidentally, the CIA, also based in Virginia, has a "rendition" program that sends terrorists back to the nations that spawned them, so they can get the flaying they deserve.)

Though the transplant program runs with typical Bush administration efficiency, there have been a few screw-ups, like the time the janitor accidentally turned off power to the nursery, and surgeons had to implant the heart of a pig from a nearby farm in the Vice President – alongside the leaking terrorist heart already there – to get him through a televised campaign debate.

That is why the Vice President – renowned for his charming but razor-sharp debating style – was "bedah, bedah, bedahing" like Porky Pig during the debate: his Islamo-fascist heart was rejecting his pork heart.

Luckily, soon after the debate was over, sturdier organs became available when what may have been the last Euphrates crocodile on earth was run over by a speeding Humvee in the marshlands of southern Iraq. The Euphrates crocodile is an ancient creature, with 6 hearts, 7 stomachs and 3 livers, and the Vice President came out of surgery like his old self – full of piss, vinegar and crocodile parts.

- A.O.