Fish heads fish heads roly poly fish heads…

…Fish heads fish heads eat them up yum!

The BBC’s got more on Bush’s interview with the German paper Bild am Sonntag about which Litbrit posted yesterday, in which Bush noted that the high point of his presidency was catching a perch in his lake. (That would be the 11-acre, 17-foot-deep manmade lake on his property that he stocked with fish himself; hat tip Digby.) Anyway, the BBC also notes that Bush said of his “worst moment,” the 9/11 attacks:

"In such a situation it takes a while before one understands what is happening. I would say that this was the hardest moment, once I had the real picture before my eyes."

Insert your own “My Pet Goat” joke here. (Am I the only one who recollected, upon reading that, how not difficult it was to comprehend what was happening that morning? I was then working in a high-rise on Chicago’s Mag Mile, smack dab between the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower, and I didn’t sit around like a dumb fuck incapable of grasping the severity of the situation. Like, I imagine, people all over the country, I started sorting out a response, and called the office of the building to see if they had any information, located flashlights in case we had to make an emergency evacuation, and confirmed with the CTA that public transportation would continue to run so that when we were, inevitably, evacuated, people knew they had a way to get home. I imagine this took me less than 7 minutes. Ahem.)

Anyway, Bush also had a few thoughts on the World Cup.

Mr Bush was asked about the World Cup being hosted by Germany and admitted that when he was young, soccer "simply did not exist" where he was brought up.

But he added: "There is a new generation of Americans who have grown up with soccer.

"For them, the World Cup is of great interest and it's the most important sporting event in the world. And some of us, the old guys, are beginning to understand how important the World Cup is for the entire world."

Let’s just skip right over the arrogance of “the leader of the free world” admitting he’s finally coming around to the notion that the biggest event for the most popular sport in the word is important. Instead, I’d like to examine Bush’s claim that soccer didn’t “exist” where he was brought up.

Bush was “brought up” (in part) at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, which has a champion boys’ soccer team and one of the best soccer facilities in New England. I’m not sure what year the program started, but I know it was in existence during Bush’s tenure at the elite boarding school, because this press release about a $1 million donation to renovate the soccer field notes that the two sons of the man who bequeathed the gift played on Phillips’ team.

Smoyer, a resident of Princeton, N.J., made the commitment in honor of his sons David ’59 of Jamaica Plain, Mass., and Bill ’63, who was killed in action in Vietnam in 1968. Both played varsity soccer for each of their three years at Andover…

Bush graduated from Phillips in 1964—after both Smoyer boys. Perhaps he was simply unaware of the existence of soccer in the same way he was unaware of how strings were pulled on his behalf to avoid service in Vietnam, but a more likely scenario is that he’s just incapable of not lying about everything. In spite of even some dumb schlub in Podunk, Indiana (that’d be me) being able to look up his bio and his school’s athletic program thanks to the internets, thereby easily disproving his claim that “soccer ‘simply did not exist’ where he was brought up,” he’s so stubbornly determined to pretend he’s just a good ol’ boy from Texas that he’ll spout all manner of bullshit to reinforce that ridiculous image. What an unbelievable wanker.

Finally, he had some generalizations to make about Germany (and Germans) that I’m sure they’ll appreciate:

"The Germans today simply don't like war... And I can understand that. There is a generation of people whose lives were thrown into complete disarray by a horrible war."

Argh. You know, not too put too fine a point on it, but there have been several generations of Americans whose lives were thrown into complete disarray by horrible wars, too—including his generation. He may have skated merrily through the Vietnam war untouched by its horrors, but not every man of his age was so fortunate. (He could stand to learn about this, as well as the existence of soccer, from the Smoyer family.) And the grossest thing about his comment is the recognition that there are people in Germany who have learned the lessons of horrible wars, while tacitly conceding there are Americans—chief among them himself—who haven’t.

Arrogant, mendacious, ignorant. A slip of a man who doesn’t deserve to be employed as a Wal-Mart greeter, yet he’s running the fucking country. And the best part of his time at the helm has been catching a fish. Awesome.