Photos from Salon.com

Salon is carrying this story, along with a photo of Bush on his ranch with an identical bulge in the back of his T-shirt. It is a device which works with an earpiece lodged in Bush’s ear canal, receiving and sending via a transceiver unit worn on his back:

“There’s no question about it. It’s a pretty obvious one — larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability,” said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president’s back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.

Darbut speculates that the device the president wears is provided by the Secret Service, noting, “They’re not going to have him driving around the countryside on his ranch without being in instant contact with him.”

The relevance is that if Bush were wired, it would be in direct violation of debate rules, and considered a rather severe case of dishonesty and cheating in such an important public event. The problem is, the Bush people can just keep denying it, and unless someone can bring up more proof, few enough people will accept it as certain, no matter what experts say.

It is not even certain that Bush stopped using one, or could conceal it better for the third debate. Ideally, the candidates would have their ears checked, but you know that Bush would never agree to that, even privately; he would just bull his way through. Scrambling transmissions would interfere with the TV broadcast, so those would probably be out as well.