What's wrong with George W. Bush?
This is not a political post, so my few friends who are uncomfy with my views on this election can read it. Maybe one of them can even tell me what might be wrong with their boy and the way he talks. I keep seeing clips of him addressing audiences a few years ago and he didn't have the awkward pauses in his speech. He didn't start sentences and then, halfway through, look like he wanted to stop and ask for directions. He didn't have all those odd facial expressions, including the recent one where the left corner of his mouth seems to always do the exact opposite of the rest of his face. You cannot look at old footage of the man and not wonder wha' happened?
Presidents do undergo physical changes while in office. Their extreme features and gestures all seem to become exaggerated and by the time they leave the White House, they all look like the Drew Friedman caricature and sound like Dana Carvey's dubbing them. They also seem to age three years for every one they actually served…then once they're out of office, they get about half those years back. Did you ever see photos of Lyndon Johnson in '64, '68 and '70? They look like pictures of a man, his grandfather and his father…in that order.
Is that all that's happened to Bush? That the stress of the job is scrambling his speech patterns?
Around the Internet, even pro-Bush sites are starting to hesitantly float irresponsibly reckless theories about strokes or various medical conditions or even drug use. Before Election Day, some sort of baseless, long distance diagnosis may make it into the mainstream press for a brief, unfortunate controversy.
Like I said, this is not a political post. If you think Bush has the right answers on Iraq and the economy, you're not going to switch your vote even if it turns out he's a robot and in dire need of Rustoleum. But something has impacted his oratorical skills and it may even explain why he didn't do better in the debates than he did. It would be nice to know what it is.