Critic to Bush: Get a horse
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Having voted in my last junior high student council election long ago, I am normally unmoved by suggestions that this column adopt a more upbeat perspective regarding President Bush. I can think of no good reason either to feign school spirit or pretend enthusiasm for the administration’s manifest failures, foreign and domestic. Friends in Austin, Texas, assure me that Bush can be disarmingly personable. So can every other confidence man who ever ran a successful swindle. I enjoy reminding FOX News devotees who have adopted the Soviet practice of diagnosing Dear Leader’s critics with psychiatric disorders that no man alive exudes more personal charm than the Arkansas antichrist, William Jefferson Clinton. Even so, there are two areas in which I’ll defend Bush to the end: his love of baseball and his passion for physical exercise. The president recently underwent his annual physical exam at the National Naval Medical Center. Doctors not only couldn’t find anything wrong with him, they pronounced him in "superior" physical condition for a 59-year-old man. At "nearly 6 feet" and 191 pounds, Bush has a resting pulse rate in the high 40s and a body fat percentage of 15.79, the last two numbers equivalent to a professional athlete’s.
Having buggered up his knees through years of jogging, Bush has become a mountain bike enthusiast whose occasional tumbles are widely reported. He also works out on an inclined treadmill and lifts free weights.
Learning about Bush’s treadmill work suggests the solution to a small mystery. It’s long been my suspicion that when reported to be "cutting brush" on his ranch, Bush is actually inside watching baseball on TV in air-conditioned comfort. I figure Karl Rove invented the brush-clearing angle to make Bush resemble Ronald Reagan, a well-known horseman and chopper of firewood. As the president’s equestrian skills are limited to golf carts, a manly outdoor activity was required.
Jogging was famously a Clintonian exercise, so that wouldn’t suffice, while bicycle riding brings swarms of Spandex-garbed, latte-sipping yuppies to mind. Thus, brush cutting.
Trouble is, nobody in Texas cuts brush by hand, not even illegal Mexican ranch hands. They drag it out of the ground with big chains or chop it up with a bush hog, an oversized rotary mower pulled by a tractor. So I figure Bush is actually working out on a treadmill in front of a giant plasma TV screen. I imagine he’s invested the necessary pittance to buy the MLB package from his satellite provider, allowing him to ignore the hapless Texas Rangers in favor of any game (or games) he chooses. He’d be a fool not to.
According to Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times, Bush can bench-press 185 pounds six times, which also may explain the president’s exaggerated swagger. He’s evidently not, as detractors have suggested, imitating an adolescent chimpanzee trying to look bigger, but may simply have gotten a bit muscle-bound.
Well, good for him. Chait, however, doesn’t see it that way. Normally a writer of eminent good sense, he thinks Bush spends too much time exercising. Busy people like himself, Chait says, simply can’t spare an hour or two a day to work out. So how can the president? Complaining that "Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy," he suggests that there’s something compulsive about Bush’s zeal to keep fit.
Chait guesses that the president associates a lack of physical discipline "with his younger, boozehound days," and believes it absurd to suggest, as White House spokesmen have, that exercise keeps him mentally sharp. "The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency," Chait writes, "is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood—or, perhaps, the president himself.)"
No, what’s silly is not understanding that your brain is an organ of your body like any other. Nobody’s suggesting that working out can turn a George W. Bush into a Thomas Jefferson, the latter an exercise advocate who rode horses daily even after he was too old to mount unassisted. But a fitter Bush is a smarter, more relaxed and confident Bush than one chained to his Oval Office desk maxing out on adrenaline and stress. The time Bush spends working out greatly increases his stamina and allows him to stay alert longer than workaholics who chain their flabby carcasses to their desks in the mistaken belief that they’re indispensable. If I’d been Bush’s personal trainer, I’d have advised him to lose the cowboy boots 25 years ago before high heels wrecked his knees. Today I’d urge him to invest in a couple of dead-broke quarter horse geldings and use that ranch of his the way God intended. If he’d like a private referral, I can normally be reached during Cubs or Red Sox games pumping iron or pedaling compulsively on my Schwinn Airdyne.
Link...
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Having voted in my last junior high student council election long ago, I am normally unmoved by suggestions that this column adopt a more upbeat perspective regarding President Bush. I can think of no good reason either to feign school spirit or pretend enthusiasm for the administration’s manifest failures, foreign and domestic. Friends in Austin, Texas, assure me that Bush can be disarmingly personable. So can every other confidence man who ever ran a successful swindle. I enjoy reminding FOX News devotees who have adopted the Soviet practice of diagnosing Dear Leader’s critics with psychiatric disorders that no man alive exudes more personal charm than the Arkansas antichrist, William Jefferson Clinton. Even so, there are two areas in which I’ll defend Bush to the end: his love of baseball and his passion for physical exercise. The president recently underwent his annual physical exam at the National Naval Medical Center. Doctors not only couldn’t find anything wrong with him, they pronounced him in "superior" physical condition for a 59-year-old man. At "nearly 6 feet" and 191 pounds, Bush has a resting pulse rate in the high 40s and a body fat percentage of 15.79, the last two numbers equivalent to a professional athlete’s.
Having buggered up his knees through years of jogging, Bush has become a mountain bike enthusiast whose occasional tumbles are widely reported. He also works out on an inclined treadmill and lifts free weights.
Learning about Bush’s treadmill work suggests the solution to a small mystery. It’s long been my suspicion that when reported to be "cutting brush" on his ranch, Bush is actually inside watching baseball on TV in air-conditioned comfort. I figure Karl Rove invented the brush-clearing angle to make Bush resemble Ronald Reagan, a well-known horseman and chopper of firewood. As the president’s equestrian skills are limited to golf carts, a manly outdoor activity was required.
Jogging was famously a Clintonian exercise, so that wouldn’t suffice, while bicycle riding brings swarms of Spandex-garbed, latte-sipping yuppies to mind. Thus, brush cutting.
Trouble is, nobody in Texas cuts brush by hand, not even illegal Mexican ranch hands. They drag it out of the ground with big chains or chop it up with a bush hog, an oversized rotary mower pulled by a tractor. So I figure Bush is actually working out on a treadmill in front of a giant plasma TV screen. I imagine he’s invested the necessary pittance to buy the MLB package from his satellite provider, allowing him to ignore the hapless Texas Rangers in favor of any game (or games) he chooses. He’d be a fool not to.
According to Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times, Bush can bench-press 185 pounds six times, which also may explain the president’s exaggerated swagger. He’s evidently not, as detractors have suggested, imitating an adolescent chimpanzee trying to look bigger, but may simply have gotten a bit muscle-bound.
Well, good for him. Chait, however, doesn’t see it that way. Normally a writer of eminent good sense, he thinks Bush spends too much time exercising. Busy people like himself, Chait says, simply can’t spare an hour or two a day to work out. So how can the president? Complaining that "Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy," he suggests that there’s something compulsive about Bush’s zeal to keep fit.
Chait guesses that the president associates a lack of physical discipline "with his younger, boozehound days," and believes it absurd to suggest, as White House spokesmen have, that exercise keeps him mentally sharp. "The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency," Chait writes, "is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood—or, perhaps, the president himself.)"
No, what’s silly is not understanding that your brain is an organ of your body like any other. Nobody’s suggesting that working out can turn a George W. Bush into a Thomas Jefferson, the latter an exercise advocate who rode horses daily even after he was too old to mount unassisted. But a fitter Bush is a smarter, more relaxed and confident Bush than one chained to his Oval Office desk maxing out on adrenaline and stress. The time Bush spends working out greatly increases his stamina and allows him to stay alert longer than workaholics who chain their flabby carcasses to their desks in the mistaken belief that they’re indispensable. If I’d been Bush’s personal trainer, I’d have advised him to lose the cowboy boots 25 years ago before high heels wrecked his knees. Today I’d urge him to invest in a couple of dead-broke quarter horse geldings and use that ranch of his the way God intended. If he’d like a private referral, I can normally be reached during Cubs or Red Sox games pumping iron or pedaling compulsively on my Schwinn Airdyne.
Link...
posted by A. J. Franklin @ 16:31
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