President Hand Puppet

Comics writer Steven Grant, one of a handful of (non blog) online columnists I read regularly, refers in the political segments of his column to George W. Bush as "the Hand Puppet", because he feels the president is a mindless spokesmodel being manipulated by Cheney, Rummy, and their crew. An article on Salon.com supports this theory. They have a photograph from the first debate that shows the "strings". The image I'm showing here was was taken from aired video (provided to the other networks by Fox, who drew the long straw for covering the event) and sharpened using the software NASA uses for enhancing space probe images. (Click it to see the full-size unclipped version from Electoral-Vote.com.)

One of Bush's rules for the debate (don't you love how the candidates get to set the rules for these things?) was no photos from behind. (Surprsingly, Fox ignored him on this point.) This is why: you can see the radio receiver strapped to his back with a wire running up to an earpiece giving him answers to questions he didn't know himself.

Either that, or he's an alien.

But it would explain the president's peculiar posture during the debate and his strange-even-for-him speech patterns, like when he abruptly stopped talking as if listening to something, or when he interjected "let me finish" at a time when Kerry was silent, the moderater was passive, and the green "you've got plenty of time left" light was still on.

Either that, or he's hallucinating.

It should be interesting to see how he performs without a puppeteer in the "town hall" "debate", where a prompting device of this kind would be harder to hide and the questions from the audience will be less predictable.