22 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Some person called Jonathan Chait seems to think - for reasons that seem to indicate where the fat is in his body - that Bush has a fixation on exercise and thus the suitability of exercise fanatics for high office. Bryan the Junkyardblogger points out that at least some of the Bush cabinet are lardasses, which seems to swiftly dispose of the "must be fit to be part of my government" claim. Normally I wouldn't spend much more on this except for the fact that Chait demonstrates two classic idiocies.
The first is that he seems to think Bush should not encourage Americans to exercise:
Bush not only thinks so, he thinks it goes for the rest of us as well. In 2002, he initiated a national fitness campaign. The four-day kickoff festivities included the president leading 400 White House staffers on a three-mile run. As then-Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said: "When it comes to exercise, there are many people who just need that extra little nudge to go out there and do a little bit more exercise."
Perhaps Jonathan Chait hasn't noticed it, but the rest of us have most certainly observed that, epidemic or not, the US seems ot have more fat people than anywhere else and they seem to be more and more of them piling on more and more blubber. It is of course a little hard to tell how much this lard costs the nation in healthcare costs for chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, heart attacks, type II diabetes etc. but I'm going to guess that it is in the billions of dollars. If everyone did in fact do half an hour's exercise a day just maye the US would have solved its healthcare funding crisis.
The second idiocy is that he fails to comprehend the difference between "some" and "all".
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.)
Some people who spend a lot of time exercising are stupid, therefore, according to Chait, all exercise fanatics are stupid. The fact that exercise does seem to help mental health by stimulating neurogenesis and endorphin release, seems to indicate that actually contrary to Mr Chait's hypothesis, "mens sana in corpore sano" is in fact more than just an old wives tale. Of course the required understanding of statistics and the like that would be required to understand why exercise is a positive indicator towards mental alertness but yet that positive inidcator does not mean that all fitness fanatics are mental giants is, I fear, somewhat beyond Mr Chait's limited intellectual grasp.
Update: Michelle Malkin and others are on his case too