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 In a number of interviews recontly, President Bush has
seemed unusually ill at ease, licking his lips, shifting his weight,
hesitating in his answers, and blinking, blinking, blinking…
Bush blinks
twice. He touches his tongue to his lips. He blinks twice more.
He starts
to
answer,
but
he
stops
himself.
"I’m not going to talk about the case," Bush finally says after
a three-second pause that, in television time, feels like a commercial
break.But this much could be seen watching the tape of NBC’s
broadcast during Bush’s 14-minute pre-sunrise interview, in which he
stood unprotected by the usual lectern.
The president was a blur of blinks,
taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts. Bush has always been an active man,
but standing with Lauer and the serene, steady first lady, he had the
body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.
The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked
if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was "trying to get a second
chance to make a good first impression," Bush blinked 24 times in
his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back
funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers
up by the belt.
When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single
answer — along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious
foot jiggling. Laura Bush, by contrast, delivered only three blinks and
stood still through her entire answer about encouraging volunteerism.
Give
the guy a break. Maybe he needed a potty break. As his
recent pathetic note to Condi asking for permission to piss shows, the
President may have bladder problems. Us older Americans can’t always
predict or postpone the call of nature, even under the bright lights
of public scrutiny.
Or maybe his new antipsychotic and mood elevating medication is
kicking in with some unfortunate side effects due to interactions
with his existing
drug regime. This
is not uncommon with aripiprazole and others of the newer neuroleptic
drugs,
and probably
means he just needs to have his dosage adjusted.
Still, it is rather disconcerting to see the leader of the free
world jerking around like Pinocchio with St. Vitas Dance. We had better
all
keep a close eye on Dubya for a while. And try not to blink…
from the Washington Post
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