From Fair fax digital

US President George Bush grazed his hands when he collided with a police officer while he was cycling through the grounds of Gleneagles, the luxury hotel where world leaders are meeting in Scotland.
Mr Bush, celebrating his 59th birthday, went for a ride shortly after arriving for the summit of the Group of Eight major powers, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. Mr Bush was pedalling along on a road near the Scottish golf resort at what Mr McClellan called a "pretty good speed" about an hour into his ride when he collided with the police officer.
The officer, on security duty from a local police department, was on foot.

Some choice cuts from Tom Engelhardt: Making the World Unsafe for Democracy.

"Bring ‘em on." As then, so in Scotland, you could feel the way George Bush had absorbed his own Global War on Terror into his political and personal bloodstream. It was indeed, to use Boston Globe columnist James Carroll's word for it, his personal crusade. In that context, each terror attack is, for him, strangely like a shot of adrenaline (as it is, piety aside and for quite different reasons, for the TV news channels which ride such attacks for all they're worth). Each attack somehow bucks him up, sets him walking more resolutely. I have no doubt that, serially, they give meaning to his life. This, after all, was the man who, according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, kept in his Oval Office desk drawer "his own personal scorecard for the war" in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces took them down. This is the Osama Bin Laden (or now Zarqawi)"dead or alive" President.

...

It may be that nations deserve the leaders they get and perhaps it's no mistake that George Bush ended up as our leader -- twice no less -- in a period that otherwise seemed to cry out for having your basic set of grown-ups in power, or that his Secretary of Defense likes to play stand-up comic at his news conferences, or that his first Attorney General just loved to sing songs of his own creation to his staff, or that none of them can get it through their heads that it's not just the terrorists who, in our world, have been taking "the lives of the innocent."

I keep thinking: Who let these children out in the world on their own? Obviously the American people, in some state of global denial, did. It's strange, but I can't get out of my mind an image that Bush administration officials, from the President on down, were using regularly back in 2003-2004. They often quite publicly compared the Iraqis to a child taking his first wobbly bike ride (assumedly on a democratic path) under the administration's tutelage. There was Washington, the kindly adult, stooped over, helping balance that ungainly kid, or trying to decide whether this was the moment to take off those training wheels and let the child take an initial spin on his own, chancing of course a spill. 

...

Perhaps this image, now retired by the administration, came back to me as the President spoke because, only the day before, on a wet and slippery Scottish road, riding his own special sports bike, George had crashed into a policeman guarding him, scraping his hands and arms, and sending that policeman briefly to the hospital. 

From the New york Times
on riding his bike...

"...
Mr. Bush also told Mr. Lindlaw that when he is riding with his usual group near Washington he often plugs headphones into his ears and cranks up his iPod, "and it's like I'm alone.""""
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Gus:
Blimey! The bugger's does NOT want to listen to people, does he? See cartoon at head of blogline...