Interesting Bush Interview with UK Press

The English press is relentlessly negative towards America and President Bush, but the London Times broke ranks and published an interesting interview with the President. This line caught my eye (h/t Instapundit):

In person Mr Bush is so far removed from the caricature of the dim, war-mongering Texas cowboy of global popular repute that it shakes one’s faith in the reliability of the modern media.

No kidding. The president has a wry sense of humor, and they caught a few funny comments in the article.

The obligatory trip round the Oval Office is now so much of a ritual that he approaches it with the wry, self-mocking tone of an ersatz tour guide.

It’s an executive office, he points out, a place where decisions are made. “So the first decision I had to make was what colour the rug should be.”

The next thing he learnt about the presidency, he says, is the importance of delegating: “So I asked Laura to design it.”

...Mr Bush added a bust of President Eisenhower. It sits to the left of his desk, made from the timbers of HMS Resolute, a Victorian transport ship, another gift from the British. You’re probably the only people in here for whom I don’t need to explain what ‘HMS’ means,” he says. “My Texas friends have no idea what I’m talking about when I tell them.”

As expansive as he is, Mr Bush can’t help betraying a faint irritation at the intrusiveness of the modern media, with a reference to a famous brief medical emergency from a couple of years ago.

He points out the door in the well of the presidential desk, placed there by President Roosevelt to hide the fact that he spent his presidency in a wheelchair. “FDR was in a wheelchair and nobody knows. I choke on a pretzel and the whole world gets to hear about it.”

Across from the presidential desk, a portrait of the very first war leader of the United States, George Washington.

“He’s always been there,” Mr Bush notes. “No choice, really; the father of the nation. Had to be there. Rutherford B. Hayes just wouldn’t work,” he quips.

The president is also very generous with his guests (I've read that in numerous articles and interviews

The formal interview over, Mr Bush is once again in expansive mood. I am under firm instructions from my wife to pick up a souvenir of the trip and so I ask him if he would mind signing a picture of my daughters posed beside a cutout of Mr Bush himself.

“Oh, we can do better than that,” he says. He reaches into the drawer of the Resolute desk and diligently begins writing out greetings on presidential cards. I find myself in the faintly exhilarating position of dictating terms to the President of the United States; admittedly, only the names of each of my five children, but for a moment, it’s heady stuff.

Not content with dispensing the presidential autograph, Mr Bush reaches into a cabinet full of memorabilia and produces lapel pins and, for my colleague, a baseball with the presidential seal.

You can read the entire interview here.