Photo courtesy AP

SAN NARCISO, Calif.. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Just weeks after an American Airlines flight attendant was removed from a plane for making an outburst about 9/11 and her fears the plane would crash, the captain of a JetBlue flight en route to Las Vegas from New York suffered a bizarre midair breakdown that required passengers to subdue him. The co-pilot told the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) that he became concerned about the captain's erratic behavior shortly after Flight 191 left Kennedy International Airport. During the commute, the captain inexplicably left the cockpit and began walking the cabin, ranting about bombs and al Qaeda. At that point, a former corrections officer and six other passengers restrained him. The co-pilot diverted the flight to Texas, where an ambulance took the captain to an Amarillo hospital. Tuesday evening, however, the captain called reporters from his hospital room and blamed his emotional collapse on his realization that the United States had been taken over by gay terrorists plotting to banish Christians to the moon -- something he learned during the non-stop media coverage of the Republican primaries.

Speaking to the press under condition of anonymity, the captain explained that growing doubts about the safety of the nation had driven him to the edge of sanity: "Every time I turn on the television or commercial radio, it's nothing but Santorum and Gingrich and Romney and Limbaugh and Robertson. They do not have good news. They are very worried. I never realized it before, but this country has been overrun by homosexuals and fascist lunatics who are forcing me to buy health care and a Muslim terrorist in the highest office in the land. Did you know that Americans were rioting in front of banks -- the symbols of our freedom and superiority? I mean, why not salute the destruction of the Twin Towers?"

JetBlue officials declined to provide details on the exact cause of the captain's distress, but doctors believe his exposure to only paranoid conservative stump speeches and recaps by pundits led him to some fatalistic conclusions: "Once you've gotten yourself trapped it a bubble, there's no telling how you'll react when it pops."

Witnesses aboard Flight 191 described the captain as pacing, twitching and drinking copious amounts of water, which he ordered virgins to bless after demanding that passengers identify all the virgins on the plane. He was directed to a group of young men toward the rear of the cabin on their way to a computer programming convention. The captain then progressed up the aisles to urge passengers to recite the Lord's Prayer.

A flight attendant corroborated the accounts of witnesses: "[The captain] kept warning us about al Qaeda bombs put on the plane by gay satanists who married their dogs and liked to fire people, and who were making plans to send us all to moon colonies. He claimed these plans were written on an Etch-a-Sketch someplace. It didn't make any sense at all, but it scared the hell out of us."

The captain confessed that the last straw was his trip through the TSA screening area at the terminal in New York.

"There was this kid in a Muhammad Ali t-shirt, holding one of those Silly Putty eggs," the captain recalled. "He was right in front of me. Seemed innocent enough, but the alert TSA agents immediately seized him, wrestled him to the ground and then beat the crap out of him. I was like, 'He's only 8, what the hell's going on?' The officer pointed out that the kid was wearing Islamist propaganda and may have been carrying plastic explosives. And I felt so ignorant. I would've let this tiny suicide bomber on my plane. Maybe I got carried away, but the fact is we're doomed. Christ has abandoned us, al Qaeda has infiltrated the government, the economy is being controlled by sodomites, and there are black people in 'The Hunger Games.' For the first time in my life, I am truly afraid. We all should be."

(c) 2012. See disclaimers.