Via Salon‘s War Room:

Bush’s exercise obsession runs amok

President Bush apparently thinks that being a gym bunny or a jogger is an important prerequisite for a Supreme Court position, as War Room noted earlier.

Jonathan Chait in a commentary in today’s L.A. Times asks: “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.”


I think he’s obsessed with exercise because it’s the only thing he’s even remotely good at … except when he falls over. (Calling Bood! BOOD!)


Below, from Salon’s other report, a rather disturbing peek into how Bush’s obsession affects his judgment:
Poor Harvie.

[T]here’s the president of the United States, asking federal appellate judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III about how often he works out. “Well, I told him I ran three and a half miles a day,” Judge Wilkinson told Bumiller Wednesday. “And I said my doctor recommends a lot of cross-training, but I said I didn’t want to do the elliptical and the bike and the treadmill.” Bumiller quotes Wilkinson as saying that Bush “took umbrage at that,” and that the president told him — one of five nominees Bush is said to have interviewed for the job — that he should do the cross-training his doctor suggested.


OK, so it was a moment of idle chatter, right? Well, no, Bumiller writes. “Judge Wilkinson’s conversation with the president about exercise and other personal matters in an interview for a job on the highest court in the land was typical of how Mr. Bush went about picking his eventual nominee, Judge John G. Roberts, White House officials and Republicans said.”


— Salon (SUBSCRIPTION), reporting on a NYT story about how Bush decided on Roberts as his SCOTUS nominee.

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