Battle of the Bush Bulge

A subscription-only article on Salon discusses photo enhancements by Dr. Robert M. Nelson of Caltech and NASA’s JPL which show, pretty conclusively, that President Bush wore some kind of device during the first debate.

Salon reports:

[Nelson], however, was not laughing. He knew the president was not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor midnight blogger. He’s a senior research scientist for NASA and for Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis. Currently he’s engrossed in analyzing digital photos of Saturn’s moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or canyons….For the past week, while at home, using his own computers, and off the clock at Caltech and NASA, Nelson has been analyzing images of the president’s back during the debates.

Apparently, the good doctor has used the same techniques to analyze the bulge that are used to measure the height of craters on the Moon and Mars.

Nelson admits that he’s a Democrat and plans to vote for John Kerry. But he takes umbrage at being accused of partisanship. “Everyone wants to think my colleague and I are just a bunch of dope-crazed ravaged Democrats who are looking to insult the president at the last minute,” he says. “And that’s not what this is about. This is scientific analysis. If the bulge were on Bill Clinton’s back and he was lying about it, I’d have to say the same thing.”