whose hand is working his mouth

When I first heard it, I didn’t put too much stock in the theory that Bush was being fed lines through an earpiece during the first presidential debate. Now, however, I’m not so sure. Here’s a clip from a Slate article on that mysterious lump between Bush’s shoulder blades:

So what was it? 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.

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

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.”

So, let’s assume he does use a hidden earpiece, and that someone feeds him lines like a parrot. What should we do about it? Maybe I’m in the minority, but I don’t think it really matters. Yes, it’s horrible, and, yes, it probably signals the end of democracy that was set into motion when we hired that movie actor to be our president, but I don’t think it’s time to call for an investigation. I think doing that would just backfire. If the Democrats mention it, they’re just going to look like crazy conspiracy theorists. (Plus, the earpiece didn’t really seem to help too much last week.) Instead, if it really is true, the Kerry team just needs to interfere with the signal. They either need to block it, crank up the feedback to a horribly painful level, or, better yet, take over the channel and whisper other phrases into his ear for him to repeat.

Let’s say we could do that – what would we want him to say? It would have to be something fairly short, something that he could get completely out of his mouth before realizing. I like, “I am evil.” It’s nice and simple. What’s your idea?