W. Bush: left facial droop?

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neglect

neglect

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My aunt and uncle are physicians and adamant Republicans. They make Rush Limbaugh look like a girly-man (to borrow the expression). Anyway, they are BOTH voting for Kerry this year (in Texas, so their votes probably won't count) because they are scared of Bush. And they sent me this website:

http://www.bushout.tv/grassroots_ads/
 
can you people read? This question is about his left face drooping. We don't care if he is an idiot, we don't care who your ultra-conservative aunt and uncle voted for (is this supposed to make us say "oh, then maybe I should vote for Kerry too since Genegoddesses aunt and uncle are"), we don't care about anything on this thread other than the left face droop.

Now- the left face does droop, I don't know what to make of it. We need moving video of him in the past and now to compare the two.
 
upon further review of the photos and others, I think he just talks out the right side of his mouth. Similar to Popeye the sailor man.
 
I don't think so but what do I know. Maybe localized facial nerve damage but nothing close to Nader or the Stallone.
 
wooo said:
can you people read? This question is about his left face drooping. We don't care if he is an idiot, we don't care who your ultra-conservative aunt and uncle voted for (is this supposed to make us say "oh, then maybe I should vote for Kerry too since Genegoddesses aunt and uncle are"), we don't care about anything on this thread other than the left face droop.

Now- the left face does droop, I don't know what to make of it. We need moving video of him in the past and now to compare the two.
Click to expand...


Umm, did you READ the website? They are nervous BECAUSE they think he is losing mental capacity due to a MEDICAL condition (which may or may not be related to his left facial droop). And said medical condition may affect his ability to lead.
 
facial droop? I doubt it. looks more like facial assymmetry which is pretty common.
 
GeneGoddess,

I am going to do what few do in the world of chat room discussion. I apologize for being rude and jumping to conclusions. By reading your statement I did not get the sense that your aunt and uncle were jumping ship because of potential medical issues. I assumed the link was another BS link to some political group that was un-related to the topic. After reading the article, I see that your post was related and I am indeed sorry for the rudeness.

I must have had a bad morning.
 
No problem, I completely understand. Several member of my family had been discussing Bush's change in speaking style for several months, but none of us had seen anything that compared his preformance. So, when conservative aunt/uncle sent this website out to the raving liberals in the family, we were shocked (not just that they were not voting for Bush, but that they were concerned about his mental capacity).

The website IS interesting, but is it merely an amalgam of "convenient" clips or an objective overview of decline? I remember Bush's debates with Ann Richards (who is an EXCELLENT speaker), and I don't remember any doofy moments that seemed to define the recent presidential debates. I've been politically active a LONG time, and the Richards/Bush gubenatorial race was far from my first voting experience.

And, if Bush truly is declining, is there a relation to the left facial droop? A mild stroke? Multi-infarct demetia? Bell's palsy? Would the US have elected FDR if he ran today (as a man confined, mostly, to a wheelchair)?

But, if you DO want to see some funny anti-Bush websites, I'll send you some links. JibJab may improve your morning... 🙂 Hope the rest of your day improves...
 
I bet W is just trying to look more like Cheney (who definitely has a droop), he probably thinks it makes him look tougher. Cheney's had like 5 MI's or something so I would say that his chances of also having had a stroke at some point are pretty good.
 
did anyone watch the last debate? that's when i first noticed it. he would only turn the "normal" side of his face toward the camera when he was speaking and it looked a little like he was having difficulty controlling his saliva. but then he is prone to spitting when he gets fired up.
 
GeneGoddess said:
Umm, did you READ the website? They are nervous BECAUSE they think he is losing mental capacity due to a MEDICAL condition (which may or may not be related to his left facial droop). And said medical condition may affect his ability to lead.
Click to expand...
Wow. Dozens of issues they could be making a decision from...and they're dreaming up conspiracy theories.
 
I'm not seeing it. What I do notice about all of those pictures is that none of them are straigt on. His head is always turned or tilted at least a little. I think that could probably give the illusion of a droop, just in translating a 3-dimensional object into a 2-dimensional image.
 
I don't see it either. Unless some of the pictures are reversed, he can raise the corners of his lips on both sides, ergo, no facial droop.
 
I find this thread UNBELIEVABLY amusing. I have now subscribed to it.

-NS
 
Hi, thanks for the posts. Looks like people don't think there's a facial. I guess I disagree. That's what kappa values say, but in every picture I've seen of Bush as president, he has a left facial droop.

I would take issue with just calling it facial asymetry. That's like saying morphine makes you sleepy due to its dormative properties. Explanations are not definitions. A facial droop gives mild facial asymetry and the reason facial asymetry is common is because facial weakness is common. An alternative explanation may be that he talks out of the right side of his face. He is right handed (looked it up) - so his language is on the left hemisphere - perhaps that makes sense - didn't think of it.

If there is neurologic weakness, localization is difficult. I haven't seen him raise his eyebrows for UMN/LMN, but given how subtle it is (so subtle some posters don't see it or attribute it to light - but it's in all photos), it probably wouldn't help. We don't get any other clues - he certainly doesn't appear to have any weakness on his left side, but we can't check for something more subtle.

So: Bells? Might be. He has done cocaine apparently, so he is and continues to be at risk for stroke in a (relatively) young man - he's in his 50s? I doubt it's a neurodegenerative disorder. I was unaware of that weird video, but a facial doesn't go along with AD - nor does his age and there's no family history. If we're putting his cognitive problems into the same basket, then perhaps frontal tumor? He's young for it and he'd have progressed by now - this appears static. He was an alcoholic, perhas it's traumatic in nature? SDH or basilar skull fx in the past?

Does anyone have MRI data for this case?
 
Maybe Kerry referred him to a democrat doc for botox! Doc says "We need to fix these wrinkes on the left side of your face".
 
Something I've found while perusing pubmed..
I remember in my psych 101 class that emotions are more prominently expressed on the left side of the face. Our psych prof showed us chimeric pix of the right side and left side of the face of several politicians, including Bush and Clinton, and showed how these differ drastically....
You can also check
http://www.viewzone.com/bicam.html for some more info

J Neurosci. 2003 May 1;23(9):3820-5


Emotion processing in chimeric faces: hemispheric asymmetries in expression and recognition of emotions.
Indersmitten T, Gur RC.
Brain Behavior Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.

Since the discovery of facial asymmetries in emotional expressions of humans and other primates, hypotheses have related the greater left-hemiface intensity to right-hemispheric dominance in emotion processing. However, the difficulty of creating true frontal views of facial expressions in two-dimensional photographs has confounded efforts to better understand the phenomenon. We have recently described a method for obtaining three-dimensional photographs of posed and evoked emotional expressions and used these stimuli to investigate both intensity of expression and accuracy of recognizing emotion in chimeric faces constructed from only left- or right-side composites. The participant population included 38 (19 male, 19 female) African-American, Caucasian, and Asian adults. They were presented with chimeric composites generated from faces of eight actors and eight actresses showing four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, each in posed and evoked conditions. We replicated the finding that emotions are expressed more intensely in the left hemiface for all emotions and conditions, with the exception of evoked anger, which was expressed more intensely in the right hemiface. In contrast, the results indicated that emotional expressions are recognized more efficiently in the right hemiface, indicating that the right hemiface expresses emotions more accurately. The double dissociation between the laterality of expression intensity and that of recognition efficiency supports the notion that the two kinds of processes may have distinct neural substrates. Evoked anger is uniquely expressed more intensely and accurately on the side of the face that projects to the viewer's right hemisphere, dominant in emotion recognition.
 
I think I remember reading a while back that his mother has Bell's Palsy. I don't have a source, though.
 
Don't forget that Bush had a syncopal episode a while back and it was blamed on a pretzel. I do see some facial asymmetry, however surely if there was anything to this some genius neurologist who happened also to be a Dem would have caught on. This would have been golden material during the election for the left. I searched the net and couldn't find any thing much except a site called Dr. Zebra where he mentioned it, but didn't make much of it.
 
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