The Cindy McCain robot, with humanlike speech

"We have the technology."

That was the message out of the McCain camp today as Sen. John McCain unveiled a newly refurbished Cindy McCain robot, featuring a state-of-the-art replacement head.

While the Cindy McCain robot had been a fixture during the primary campaign, appearing at the senator's side at hundreds of campaign events, a McCain campaign aide went out of his way to indicate that with its newly installed head, the CinBot-9000 was ready "to take it to a whole new level."

"This new head is going to enable the Cindy McCain robot to do things that it could never do before," said McCain aide Davison Matz. "For one thing, it will now be able to talk."

Davison said that while the robot's previous head had been able to emit simple sentences such as "I've always been proud of my country," the replacement head will have a 400-word vocabulary that will enable the android to simulate humanlike speech.

"The robot will be able to talk about the economy as well as Sen. McCain himself," Davison said.

He also said that the newly improved Cindy McCain robot would have increased data storage, enabling it to store up to 2,000 recipes from a variety of online cooking sites.

Appearing with Sen. McCain at its unveiling, the CinBot-9000's new head appeared virtually identical to the previous one, down to its bleached blonde hair and glassy-eyed stare.

Beaming with pride, the GOP nominee remarked on the new head's resemblance to the old one: "She still plasters her makeup on like a trollop."

Elsewhere, President Bush announced plans to carve Iraq into two regions, "Full Serve" and "Self Serve."

Andy Borowitz is author of "The Republican Playbook." To find out more about Borowitz, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com