Battling colon cancer two years ago, Washington State's senate majority leader James West, who was at the time also a mayoral candidate, granted an interview to the Spokane Spokesman-Review in which he confided that his illness had brought him closer to his maker. He had come to believe that his supporters' prayers had helped drive back the malignancy. West joked that he imagined God, inundated with requests for his recovery, was barking, "Get me an angel. I need to know who this Jim West guy is."
What he apparently hadn't imagined was that the Spokesman-Review's editors wanted to know too. Prompted...