"God Bless the United Shashe"

Yesterday SCROTUS gave a speech announcing that he is recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  I'll let others discuss the prudence of that move in context of the greater community (i.e., the WORLD).

No, I'm here to discuss his speech. Not the content of the words, but the quality of his articulation. I'm a Speech Pathologist with <mumble> years of experience (it's a lot of years). The "pathologist" part of me awakens. So, let me weigh in.

Here is a portion of the speech.



L

The Whitewash House's official explanation is that he had a dry throat.  I call "Nonsense!"

A "dry throat" may impact the voice, but he did not exhibit a voice disorder. His voice has normal quality.  His speech is disordered.  He is definitely demonstrating dysarthria.  His productions of /s/ and /z/ particularly are quite distorted, as you can hear in the words "assumptions," "hearts" and "minds".  You can hear the /l/  distorted in "political" and "religious.". And OhEmGee my brain hurts listening to him say, "United Shashe."

Dry throat -- or even a dry mouth for that matter -- does not cause the weakness necessary for such distortions. To hear imprecise speech sounds like that makes me think that there is something neurological going on.  In a previous post, I wrote about the patterns of his language leading me to believe there is a neurrological disorder, and I pegged it as dementia.

An acute, transient dysarthria can be caused by a transient ischemic attack (TIA), a "mini-stroke." My new (disclaimer: completely speculative, not official, and by no means definitive) idea for a diagnosis is multi-infarct dementia. He may be having frequent mini-strokes. This may account for his off-and-on difficulties and the seeming slow, insidious progression of his difficulties. The infarcts associated with multi-infarct dementia can be sub-clinical; that is, not every episode will show symptoms. There can be tiny events throughout the brain, which, when added up, start to become expressed as symptoms or behaviors.

But let's entertain the Whitewash House's whitewash explanation. To have a dry mouth sufficient to interfere with articulation to that degree and of that quality, I'd say might happen with the kind that you get with extreme anxiety. You know the feeling. For that, I'm doubtful. This looks like weakness, pure and simple. And who are we kidding? Has the orange cheeto ever experienced that kind of anxiety talking in public?  And think of it this way: if he has had such extreme dry mouth to cause articulation problems to that extent, there must be an underlying medical problem, even if it's not something so dire as a TIA.

He's not fit. There's something wrong with him. And to keep him in the Rectangle Office (remember, lies are truth and ovals are rectangles) is to tread in dangerous waters, with sharks and Man o' War havin' a party.  Let's keep pushing our lawmakers to remove him from office. The world is getting scary.


Side note: I wanted to add: I have not seen others' interpretations of his speech problems, nor the fun that I'm sure must've been had on Twitter. I wanted to keep my thoughts pure. All I knew was the video and the official explanation. I'll revisit this with another post about the scuttlebutt around the interwebs.