Maybe Bush is getting desperate and is trying to take on attributes of the fictional president Josiah Bartlet. In the pilot episode of “The West Wing,” Bartlet crashes his bike into a tree. Today, Bush fell off his bike, injuring his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees. Of course, it wasn’t because he was so mad because fundamentalists sent a doll with a knife through its throat to his daughter, as happened in the fictional version. But it does involve his daughter, as he is attending a party tonight for her graduation.

But probably it’s just because he’s a klutz. In 2002, he suffered from the dreaded Pretzel Attack, and in 2003, he dropped his dog and then managed to fall off his Segway (images and background on the Barney Conspiracy here).

His staff tried to make the accident seem as macho as possible. A White House spokesman reported that Bush “likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn’t whistling show tunes.”

Update: the same spokesman claimed that Bush fell off his bike because “It’s been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose.” However, Kos took the trouble of looking up precipitation for Crawford and discovered that it had not rained there for an entire week. Oops.

This comes, by the way, after the Bushes declined to attend their daughter Jenna’s graduation, a move most presume is due to their not wanting to appear at a function where the audience is not hand-picked from Republican loyalty lists, Bush’s audience of choice. Heaven forbid someone who disagrees with him should be allowed with a mile’s distance. (He did, however, give a commencement address at Concordia University, a Lutheran school in Wisconsin, where he managed to stick in a sound bite against reproductive rights.) Later, it was revealed that even Jenna did not attend the ceremony in Texas.

Another fun fact about Bush: he has spent about a quarter of his term in office so far on vacation, mostly in Crawford, Texas, having visited the ranch at least 34 times now. Before September 11, Bush spent fully 42% of his time in office on vacation. And even at that, he still has not beaten out his father, who spent wholly 543 days on holiday, or 37% of his term. The two Bushes hold the #1 and #2 spot for most-vacationing presidents in U.S. history, with Reagan coming in close after them.