Reply #80: he adjusts his earpiece...

[jayctravis]

because it's a multi-lingual conference. He's having French translated to English in his ear as Chirac talks. Bush was wired, but he was supposed to be.

It's an odd pre-echo. More than likely there was the raw feed from the room, and there was an English frequency which Bush's mic and the French-to-English translator were on, and assumably a French frequency with all of Bush's words translated to French and Chirac's live mic. More than likely the idea was for the broadcast to play the live room to us when bush was speaking, then crossfade into the English translation when Chirac was speaking. Something glitched in the satellite feed and somehow the multiple audio frequencies were jogged about 4 seconds ahead of the video/live room audio. Or perhaps the video feed was actually behind...either or.

If you listen close, Bush's cadences match the pre-echo perfectly. It just happens in the first part of the tape that his usual "4-5 words and pause" speaking rhythm synced up perfectly so that it sounded like he was repeating from it. Later in the tape you hear him speaking over the second track; still with the same cadences *without any apparent confusion about this.*

If you've ever been on a cellphone talking to someone while hearing your own voice back after a delay (or worked in a call center when you hit bad echo) you know it's nearly impossible to talk comprehensibly while hearing your words echoed back to you. Most people's brains do not work full-duplex. Knowing what a poor speaker Bush is and seeing him talk normally over this "prompt" track more than likely means he wasn't hearing it.

It's very difficult to listen and repeat at the same time. I sincerely doubt Bush could do this...at least in this particular case it's not a smoking gun.

If Bush is wired in the debates, he's not getting a speech read to him; he'd be getting quick reminder cues of points he's probably rehearsed before, possibly having the occasional dictionary look up for a word like "facile" or "vociferous."