When Exercising is a Bad Thing

Jonathan Chait has a column in the LA Times that is worth noting, not for its profoundness, but for its inanity.

He writes:

A week ago, when President Bush met with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III to interview him for a potential Supreme Court nomination, the conversation turned to exercise. When asked by the president of the United States how often he exercised, Wilkinson impressively responded that he runs 3 1/2 miles a day. Bush urged him to adopt more cross-training. "He warned me of impending doom," Wilkinson told the New York Times.

Am I the only person who finds this disturbing? I don't mean the fact that Bush would vet his selection for the highest court in the land in part on something utterly trivial. That's expected. What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.

WHAT???

Do you think a lib would be criticized for exercising? No chance.

There is nothing creepy about being healthy. One minute the libs want to put warning labels on soda and the next they are calling exercise "creepy."

Given the importance of his job, it is astonishing how much time Bush has to exercise. His full schedule is not publicly available. The few peeks we get at Bush's daily routine usually come when some sort of disaster prods the White House Press Office to reveal what the president was doing "at the time." Earlier this year, an airplane wandered into restricted Washington air space. Bush, we learned, was bicycling in Maryland. In 2001, a gunman fired shots at the White House. Bush was inside exercising. When planes struck the World Trade Center in 2001, Bush was reading to schoolchildren, but that morning he had gone for a long run with a reporter. Either this is a series of coincidences or Bush spends an enormous amount of time working out.

I would not say that Bush spends an "enormous" amount of time working out. That's ludicrous.

Did Clinton spend an "enormous" amount of time at...you know?

There's no denying that the results are impressive. Bush can bench press 185 pounds five times, and, before a recent knee injury, he ran three miles at a 6-minute, 45-second pace. That's better than I could manage when I played two sports in high school. And I wasn't holding the most powerful office on Earth. Which is sort of my point: Does the leader of the free world need to attain that level of physical achievement?

Bush not only thinks so, he thinks it goes for the rest of us as well.

I agree with Chait on the point that the results are impressive. Bush is in great shape.

As to his question about whether the President needs to be so physically fit, I say he doesn't NEED to be. But, why would anyone have a problem with him being in that condition?

The benefits of exercise are many, such as alleviating stress. I think Bush's choice of physcial activities to relax is far more appropriate for a married man and the leader of the free world than Clinton's preferred method of relieving stress.

In 2002, Bush fired Lawrence Lindsey, his overweight economic advisor. Lindsey's main crime was admitting to Congress that the Iraq war might cost $200 billion, at a time when the administration was trying to cut taxes and was insisting that the war would cost nothing. But compounding things was the fact that, as the Washington Post reported, Bush "complained privately about [Lindsey's] failure to exercise."

My guess is that Bush associates exercise with discipline, and associates a lack of discipline with his younger, boozehound days. "The president," said Fleischer, "finds [exercise] very healthy in terms of … keeping in shape. But it's also good for the mind." The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood — or, perhaps, the president himself.) But Bush's apparent belief in it explains why he would demand well-conditioned economic advisors and Supreme Court justices.

Chait gets more ridiculous as he goes along.

What a lame theory!

If Bush had some bizarre requirement that all the President's men had to be exercise freaks, do you think he'd have Dick Cheney as his Vice President?

Of course, Chait's column is done somewhat tongue in cheek. However, his point that Bush spends too much time exercising is straight off of Michael Moore's website. Chait isn't kidding in his criticism.

Bush's insistence that the entire populace follow his example, and that his staff join him on a Long March — er, Long Run — carries about it the faint whiff of a cult of personality. It also shows how out of touch he is. It's nice for Bush that he can take an hour or two out of every day to run, bike or pump iron. Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does.

The fact that Bush exercises in no way proves that he's out of touch.

Did the libs think of Bill Clinton as out of touch for shutting down LAX to get a $200 haircut?

Well, I did; but the libs didn't.

(Yes, I know there are lib blogs that claim this never happened. If you have doubts, I suggest that you READ Dee Dee Myers' account of the $200 haircut.)

What's the point of Chait suggesting that Bush's exercise regimen is a bad thing?

It's just a hit piece, without any redeeming value and completely lacking substance.

Actually, by way of his prickly little column, Chait illustrates the current state of the Democratic Party these days--no ideas, no vision, just smears.

Well done, Chait. Well done.