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The disclosure that Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, owns 13 motor vehicles brought a quick follow-up today from the Arizona senator.

Instead of seeing it as another sign of his fabulous wealth and alienation from the lives of average Americans, he said voters should understand that the McCain fleet is part of a secret, private research project designed to test new fuel sources. This project, for the benefit of the nation’s future, is funded entirely by his wife Cindy, Arizona’s richest beer distribution heiress.

“One of the cars runs on beer,” McCain revealed, “because Cindy tells me there’s an infinite supply and that as long as she’s a stockholder, there always will be.”

Taking a suggestion from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential running mate, the McCain research project is testing whale oil as a substitute for petroleum. “It’s organic,” Sen. McCain explained, “which will go down well with younger voters. And if that global warming scare actually comes to pass, we won’t have to hunt whales, they’ll just be lying all over the beaches. Cheaper processing and cheaper prices at the pump.”

A supersecret program within the program is said to involve a joint effort with the National Rifle Assoc. to design a car fired by guns. “Bullet power” would theoretically increase auto-mobile speed exponentially while at the same time expanding gun use beyond the founding fathers’ wildest dreams.

McCain scoffed at Democratic attempts to picture his mass car ownership as another sign of his out-of-touch plutocratic lifestyle. “Most of these cars were abandoned on one or another of my sprawling properties by guests who ran out of gas before they could get to the main house,” he explained. He did admit that some were gifts from admirers in the energy, savings-and-loan and military sectors. “And I won one in a Environmental Protection Agency fund-raising raffle for that particle collider in the Grand Canyon.”

To set a fuel-saving example for the rest of the nation, both Cindy and John McCain ride in sedan chairs when running errands around their Phoenix neighborhood. “I think they just might catch on,” the senator observes. “Think of the employment opportunities for the jobless.”

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of “All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall” and “Zany Afternoons.”