One imagines that this could all be easily cleared up with a word from the White House. Clearly, there is something weird under the president's coat. If it's not part of an ear-prompting system, what is it? Is it a back brace? Does the president have a medical condition? If so, shouldn't we know about it? Is it a security device -- if so, why is nobody in the administration suggesting that? Instead of clear answers, Bush officials only issue bizarre dismissals. "The president is an alien," Bush-Cheney campaign chair Ken Mehlman told reporters in the Spin Room at Wednesday's debate. "You heard it here first. The president is an alien. That's your quote of the day. He has been getting information from Mars. The shock of the debate will be the president's alien past will be exposed, which is why that box is there."

Are we supposed to think the White House is hiding nothing when it issues statements like that? "You have the Internet people doing their thing, and the Internet people are letting whatever the rumor of the day is go ahead," says Chris Shaw, who runs the Bush Wired blog. "But the White House is putting out their stupid rumors themselves, too."

And the story is hurting Bush. In the last week, Salon has run three pieces on the bulge, and we've been absolutely deluged by Web traffic. The story is now a regular feature on late-night comedy shows, and it's come up in the post-debate spin room several times. Just about the only site on the Web where you can't find talk of the bulge is Matt Drudge's -- but Drudge's refusal to link to the story is itself an indication of just how powerful this thing is. Drudge instead pushed a strange, competing story about Sen. Kerry allegedly removing an object from his pocket during the debate -- an object that later turned out to be a pen. Nobody knows better than Drudge (who didn't respond to requests for this story) the value of a good, believable political rumor. The idea that Bush was prompted in the debate -- like the claim that Al Gore took credit for inventing the Internet, or George H.W. Bush wasn't familiar with supermarket scanners -- resonates with people.

In politics these days, given what's happened over the past few years, "there is an anxiety that what we are seeing in public is simply being staged for the purpose of deceiving us, that the whole facade of the political process is simply a paid political message," says John Pike, a security analyst at GlobalSecurity.org who does not believe that Bush was wired, but sees how others might believe it. "There's this hope that it is not so comprehensively fake that it is beyond our power to detect the fakery -- Toto will detect the little man behind the curtain. Here you've got Dubya coming out there acting like Oz, the great and terrible. And people like to think they have seen through this huge deception." Mark Crispin Miller, author of "Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's New World Order," half-concurs, saying that while he believes the president was probably wired, whether or not the bulge theory is true "doesn't alter the fact that what [Bush] says is carefully scripted and dishonest." "In cyberspace," Miller says, "the Bush regime stands accused of many things they may not have done. What's interesting is that so many reasonable people in the country are so agnostic on such provocative questions."

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