http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/oconnor/2005-08-22-oconnor_x.htm<snip>
This was a minor misstep when measured against a biking and fishing vacation lasting longer than the Spanish Inquisition. Bush is a man who cares about fitness — this is good. When a bum knee forced him to stop running, he could've done what most 50-something men with bum knees do: limit their recreational pursuits to synchronized channel-surfing. Bush burned calories on the 10-speed instead.
But nobody wants to hear about his impressive pulse rate and body-fat percentages when American boys and girls are dying overseas, and when lawmakers start throwing around the dreaded V-word — Vietnam — in the daily dialogue on Iraq.
Sometimes sports and war are necessary companions under the same dateline — Franklin Roosevelt told Kenesaw Mountain Landis to keep baseball running during World War II — and sometimes they are not — Dwight Eisenhower interrupted one of his countless golf outings at Augusta National to announce that the United States would resume testing nuclear bombs
Bush didn't need to keep his Tour-de-Farce date with Armstrong even if Cindy Sheehan had left "Camp Casey," named for her fallen son, to be with her ailing mother. No president refusing to spend an hour with the parent of a dead soldier should spend a day basking in the glow of a cycling champ.
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