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.)
A couple of things about this kind of stink, not least of which is that the most commonly stocked perch in Texas is the Nile Perch, which gets to be about twelve pounds, so seven and a half isn't much of a big deal.
I am guessing that there is a failure of translation, here, and that the fish in question is probably a large-mouthed bass. Either that, or Bush is even more of a faux redneck than we already knew. Perch? Big fucking deal. The fish everyone really goes for is the large-mouthed bass. Texas is crawling with those, and seven and a half pounds in a stocked lake is a decent catch.... but, y'know, you can bet that the President's lake is going to be stocked with some trophy fish... which, y'know, kind of takes the real sport out of it.
I'm just saying.
(If you can't trust Skeeter, Biscuit and Possum over at Powerline to catch this sort of redneck arcana, you're gonna have to turn to a real redneck like myself.)
This kind of reminds me of Bush's bete noire and how his latter days devolved into "fishing" and other irrelevancies as they relate to piloting the ship of state-
One of Saddam Hussein's favourite pastimes was fishing, but in lieu of a fishing rod he used grenades, according to a French filmmaker who caught rare footage of the Iraqi leader and his lifestyle.
...
Mr. Soler also smuggled out footage of the Iraqi leader tossing a grenade into a pond.
``He loved fishing, but fishing with grenades. So when he went fishing he took a scuba diver and a grenade, and he threw the grenade into the water and suddenly you had hundreds of fish dead,'' he said.
We should build a big theme park somewhere far out on the African Plains, and send these guys out there to fish in the big stocked lake, hunt pen-raised birds, and whack each other with chunks of firewood when they get antsy. I mean, the boys I was raised with like to hunt and fish and tinker with old cars, and when they get a little itchy to brawl, they go have a little whisky and invite someone outside to dance. It's a lot cheaper in terms of lives and treasure than looking at a country six thousand miles away and saying "You fucking looking at me, sweetheart? You got some kind of goddamn problem?"
crossposted over at the old fishin' hole.
