Bush wired

And I'm not talking about cocaine this time.

Until the "debates" I couldn't make myself watch or listen to Crawford's Village Idiot. Back when I started writing YWA (one year ago October 13), however, I did start to read transcripts of his rare press conferences and conversations with journalists. I was surprised to find bizarre speech patterns and nonsense, starts and stops, and abruptly unfinished sentences with complete changes of direction. I decided there were two likely explanations: he was either experiencing some neurological damage symptoms (possibly alcohol- or disease-related), or he was wearing an earpiece through which he was being fed instructions, corrections and prompts.

The question has come up and exploded across the internet after the first Bush-Kerry debate, because of these photographs:

That certainly looks like something in the middle of his back underneath his jacket, and it looks like there's a component of it that snakes up over his right shoulder.

The story has jumped out of the blogosphere, as stories are doing these days much, much more rapidly than they were when I started blogging.

From the New York Times:

"There was nothing under his suit jacket," said Nicolle Devenish, a campaign spokeswoman. "It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric." Ms. Devenish could not say why the "rumpling" was rectangular.

From Salon:

Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate?

...Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with the claim that the Bush administration insisted on a condition that no cameras be placed behind the candidates. An official for the Commission on Presidential Debates, which set up the lecterns and microphones on the Miami stage, said the condition was indeed real, the result of negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn't stop Fox from setting up cameras behind Bush and Kerry.

...Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and the owner of the Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance shop in Spokane, Wash., looked at the Bush image on his computer monitor. "There's certainly something on his back, and it appears to be electronic," he said. McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge could be the inductor portion of a two-way push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a system makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that is pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is virtually invisible. He also said a weak signal could be scrambled and be undetected by another broadcaster.

...Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies -- notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's appearance. "They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera," Schechter said. "The Democrats weren't doing that at their convention."

But back to the internet...there's a website that is totally devoted to this one thing: Is Bush Wired?.

That site offers an explanation from a reader to the double-talk at thte D-Day speech:

"I think the Bush - Chirac clip is pretty simple to explain. Many networks run a text-service for their live programming, where they use a speech-recognition engine and a re-speaker to dictate to that engine what is said by whoever speaks in the program. The text is then fed to be overlaid the "live" programming in progress. Live here means delayed so that the timing of the text is more or less matched with what is going on on-screen. The re-speaker needs to be a second or two ahead of the "live" feed for the recognition engine to be able to generate the text. What I think you hear here is the voice of the re-speaker that has for some reason been overlaid the "live" voice-feed."

Another website is doggedly following the story (calling it Promptergate) - Cannonfire - where you'll find these...

Such a unit is composed of two pieces. The "earpiece" is either lodged deep within the ear or (as current technology permits) placed next to a molar. The within-the-ear version is very difficult to see unless one knows what to look for.

post [I added the link to the molar listening device.)

"Shadowing" (the simultaneous or near-simultaneous repetition of a word or phrase) has been much discussed in the technical literature of linguistics...One of the findings of shadowing experiments is that "listeners need to hear only 200-250 ms of a word to repeat it." I imagine this process would lead to "false positives" -- for example, a listener may guess that the word is "botanical" when it is actually "botulism." This may explain some of Bush's more amusing malapropisms.

post

They say this is a photo of Butthead wearing an earpiece.

I wonder what the WH will eventually come up with. So far, according to the NYT, they have said he wasn't wearing a bullet-proof vest (which is what I figured it probably was), and that it probably was just a wrinkle.

Mark McKinnon, media director of the re-election campaign, as you would expect, has said, 'The President has never been assisted by any audio signal."

For the time being, it looks like Butthead's tailor is falling on his needle.

Georges de Paris, who made the suit worn by Bush, said the bulge was nothing more than a pucker along the jacket's back seam, accentuated when the president crossed his arms and leaned forward.

Seattle Times article

His tailor is French?!? That pucker sprouted a tail curving up over the dimwit's right shoulder blade. And look at this one from the second debate...

Do his shoulder blades really extend all the way down his back? Is he having his suits made with some whalebone stays to give him some particular look? Is Georges de Paris just a bad tailor? Is Dufus wearing back braces or something? He certainly slumped all over that podium in the first debate. I don't know. [A] picture of his famous huff sure did make him look like he was wearing a badly tailored suit. But that "bulge" in the back of those jackets does look like some device. Maybe it's his wind-up key. We'll see. Somebody with a fixation is going to keep after this one. And my last comment is this: think how inept the man truly is if this turns out to be true, and he still can't speak with any intelligence.