Sparked by recent revelations that Public Broadcasting System (PBS) News hour host Jim Lehrer died more than four years and seven months ago, political and medical investigators are closely monitoring the appearance, life signs, and behavior of a large but undisclosed number of key figures in American public life.  

As PBS, the Pentagon, and the Lehrer family physician acknowledged earlier this week, the listless and vapid Lehrer passed away after a hang-gliding accident in early March of 2003. Before drawing his last breath as he lay in a secluded and secret hospital bed, the ex-Marine Lehrer agreed to let his body be used in a covert CIA program meant to encourage mass domestic consent for planned invasions of Iraq and Iran.  “Anything for my country,” he said, very slowly, eliciting yawns and distracted looks of boredom moments before he expired.  

The program was code-named “Project Talking Head.” A team of military, intelligence, medical and science experts commissioned by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reconstructed and reactivated Lehrer's deceased body.  They provided the new “bionic anchorman” with minimal locomotion functions and the power to read neutral, passionless, falsely “objective” and vaguely power-worshipping “news” text carefully scripted by unnamed intelligence professionals.

According to one highly placed Pentagon source who spoke on condition of anonymity, “some guy in Cheney's office saw Lehrer as a ‘critical homeland public relations asset' dead or alive on the eve of illegally invading Iraq to deepen U.S. control over key Middle Eastern petroleum reserves.  They were happy as Hell to hear that Lehrer was near death, just as ‘Project Talking Head' had become fully operational and we were locked and loaded for ‘liberating' Iraq.  They even joked about having him killed for the project but some of us wondered if that was even necessary.  I mean Lehrer was already good at what he's been doing ever since he died for real – putting all those pathetic latte-sipping liberals to sleep about the unbelievable shit we've been pulling at home and abroad, like occupying a country that had done nothing to us and doing it on totally false pretenses.  That's part of why he was chosen: the changes in visible behavior we were going to introduce would have been especially hard to notice with him.”   

"You saw,” the Pentagon source adds, “what we had to do with that liberal asshole Dan Rather when he started mouthing off about Dubya's draft record…. ‘I'm an American first and I'll line up wherever the president wants me.' Yeah, right. He's lucky we didn't snatch his body up for the project.”    

Neither the Pentagon nor Lehrer's doctor has responded to queries about the scientific breakthroughs and procedures that have permitted Lehrer to continue reading passionless yet strangely "patriotic" “news” five nights a week for more than four and half years after his  death. 

But two anonymous CIA sources have suggested that undisclosed stem-cell and robotic advances made in California in late 2002 “closed the deal on Project Talking Head's viability. By September, we were just waiting for fresh meat.”   

The still sketchy project revelations have a large number of investigators wondering about numerous other public figures who have played critical roles in paralyzing, boring, depressing, and confusing the populace and deadening its underlying anger at United States domestic and foreign policies – some of the most reactionary, regressive, idiotic,  and unpopular in the world.  

Of special interest for those examining the possibly larger breadth of “Project Talking Head” is the Democratic Party's chillingly machine-like presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Barack (“love your oppressor”) Obama, daytime television paternity tester Maury Povich (whose vicious portrayal of poor Americans is useful in advancing the ongoing corporate assault on lower class Americans), NBC News anchor Brian Williams, and former U.S. Senator Tom Daschle.  One anonymous CIA source claims that Daschle had to be removed from the Senate after an early 'Talking Head' experiment with him "went bad in ways too terrible to discuss.”  

Inquiry is focusing heavily on Pelosi, whose failure to pursue impeachment and repeated willingness to fund the illegal invasion of Iraq have combined with her “hauntingly Pinocchio-doll-like appearance and movements” (in one expert's words)  to make some investigators take a second look at claims that she died in a mysterious plane crash in Arlington, Virginia in January of 2006.  Tapes allegedly containing “Mayday” reports from one of Pelosi's corporate jets have been mysteriously “lost."  

Obama is strongly rumored to have been created from scratch in “a highly multicultural west coast lab” in the spring of 2003. “This guy came out of nowhere,” notes one researcher, “and we are having a hard time matching up Obama's facial images and eye motions before and after about May of 2003. By the Keynote Address (in late July 2004),  he was fully operational. It was actually a very conservative speech.”    

Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards has come under some scrutiny because of his seemingly ageless appearance and “always perfect hair,” but political investigators are now ruling him out.  They say his insistent and increasingly fiery commentary denouncing growing class inequality and poverty in the U.S. is inconsistent with the ideological profile ‘Project Talking Head's' directors were working with. "This guy has been moving from lifeless to lively over time,” one researcher notes – “the opposite of the pattern you'd be looking for.  And let's be honest, the project is about trying to deaden the populace to class inequality and corporate domination and stuff like that...They'd be much more likely to go with somebody like Obama, who uses this tranquilizing smooth jazz persona and takes this ponderous and 'professorial' approach to talk about ‘healing the nation's divisions' and ‘getting things done across partisan lines' and all that  ‘hope' and ‘Kumbaya' stuff."  

“The other thing about Obama is they made him technically ‘black,' which helps them basically screw with the heads of white 'progressive' liberals, especially in heavily Caucasian places like Iowa and New Hampshire."

" Better yet, they might have worked up Hillary: she's as dead as they come and she cranks out the one-liners at the debates like she's reading from a finely tuned program, which is very creepy and more than a little suspicious."