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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (58257)	10/3/2004 7:44:26 PM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 89467

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (58257)	10/3/2004 7:45:00 PM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 89467

Regarding Bush having an earpiece during the debate.... Although I don’t think Bush used an earpiece in last week’s debate, I think he probably has in the past. I posted about this on a few blogs last year: According to conventional wisdom and prevailing journalistic boilerplate, in declaring war on terror President George W. Bush finally “found his voice.” Even if the news media has been guilty of exaggerating the president’s post-911 “gravitas,” there’s no denying that Bush’s verbal abilities seemed to improve markedly after that disaster. The most verbally impaired, grammatically confused American president in modern history suddenly began to speak with a measure of coherence that had decisively eluded him during the first 54 years of his life (to say nothing of the first nine months of his presidency). The stammering and the malapropisms didn’t go away – as The Daily Show has persistently demonstrated. Nor did the stark cognitive blackouts completely evaporate ("There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas – it’s probably in Tennessee – that says: ‘Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. But fool me… you can’t get fooled again.’"). But in his less formal appearances – i.e., those without the benefit of a TelePrompter – the president often began to sound almost, well, fluent in his native tongue. We’re not talking about Platonic-level dialog here, or even a Toastmaster-grade facility with debate-team rhetoric. It’s just that Bush now more often than not seemed to be achieving subject-verb agreement of the complete-sentence variety. It was a transformation as startling as the one in “Flowers for Algernon,” the short story about an imbecile who more than triples his IQ after taking an experimental drug previously tested only on mice. Far from ascribing the president’s new-found speaking skills to mouse intelligence enhancers not yet approved by the FDA, the mainstream media generously attributed Bush’s new verbal confidence to on-the-job growth, and that old saw about great events making great presidents. Maybe. But for me, there was a more apt explanation, one that seemed to make much more sense. As I watched George Bush speaking in short and declarative sentences bracketed by peculiar pauses, I was suddenly reminded of a classic David Letterman stunt. In the ongoing segment, Dave would dispatch his Ed Sullivan Theater neighbor, the good-natured deli owner Rupert Gee, onto the mean streets of New York outfitted with a wireless earpiece. From the security of a nearby van, Dave would feed Rupert a succession of wise-ass zingers, and Rupert would dutifully lay them on unsuspecting passersby, often at great risk of New York-style retribution. Comedy Central’s The Man Show later recycled the prank with the help of a tubby kid similarly wired for sound. Was it possible that Bush’s new ability to articulate more than sentence fragments also depended upon a hidden transmitter? The technology certainly exists. Both the Letterman and Man Show stunts made use of a device that has since become commonplace in Hollywood productions, when actors may not have time to memorize lengthy scenes of dialog. You can pick one up yourself for two or three grand from any number of online spy gear outlets (for instance, accelerated-promotions.com. Billed as the “new generation of covert communication,” the device is a tiny wireless receiver “worn comfortably and invisibly in the ear canal.” The casual observer can neither see nor hear the device, which boasts a sophisticated squelch circuit and an automatic gain control. Is it possible that George W. Bush has become the electronic-age equivalent of tongue-tied Christian from Cyrano De Bergerac, wooing not Roxanne but the American electorate with sweet, near-grammatical poetry fed to him remotely by Dick Cheney or Karl Rove? I’m not the only one to so speculate. Documentary filmmaker Jay Weidner has used wireless earpieces in his work, and thinks Bush is doing the same. “As I watched Bush give his recent speech,” he recently stated in an article posted at www.rense.com (http://www.rense.com/general35/voices.htm), “his eyes wandered from right to left and from left to right. It was obvious that he was not reading from a TelePrompTer. Also I noticed that there were long pauses between his sentences. … As a Film Director I recognized immediately what was happening” – namely, a concealed earpiece. “Is this what Bush is doing? My answer is a definite ‘yes’. During this same speech I watched as he immediately corrected a word that he had just mis-spoken. I have encountered this before during film shoots using the earpiece prompt. This is done because the speaker has gone slightly ahead of the earpiece prompt. He makes the mistake and then hears the correct word in his ear. He then corrects himself and goes on like nothing happened.”