Reply #17: About the (recently updated) photo ......

[DulceDecorum]

The president-elect stands behind and to the side of Ann Veneman, his nominee for agriculture secretary. George W. Bush is slightly out of focus. His head is cocked to the left and tilted slightly backward, his mouth downturned in a perfect cartoonish crescent, the way a first-grader might draw a frown. His eyes are squinty.
Identical. Different tie, identical pose.

<snip>

Adam Shannon, the Washington communications consultant who first brought this matter to my attention, had a theory of his own: The Bush we know, the Bush we see, the Bush at the debates, the Bush on the campaign trail, the Bush we elected, the Bush whom J. Scott Applewhite and others have been photographing, is "an animatronic robot."

A machine?

"It's a fusion of a servo-motorized biofidelic shell and a sophisticated artificial intelligence module," Shannon theorizes.

What we are seeing in these photos, he postulates, is "a machine that has defaulted into standby mode." At a press conference in which attention is directed elsewhere, he said, the robot would "go into a temporary shutdown state in which it assumes a preprogrammed pose while waiting its turn to reactivate and begin speaking."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A52767-2000Dec26¬Found=true