Think Progress has video of the President unknowingly caught on tape at the G8 luncheon today. The whole thing is so un-Presidential that I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st, but there’s one part that I just don’t understand:

As he chats with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bush expresses amazement that it will take Putin and an unidentified leader just as long to fly home to Moscow as it will take him to fly back to Washington. Putin’s reply could not be heard.

“You eight hours? Me too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country. Takes him eight hours to fly home. Not Coke, diet Coke. … Russia’s big and so is China. Yo Blair, what’re you doing? Are you leaving,” Bush said.

One of the many knocks on Bush before he took office is that he hadn’t been to many foreign countries and had no experience with foreign leaders. He’s been in the White House now for more than five years, and had a year of Condi’s “Foreign Policy for Dummies” course before that, and he’s still perplexed by the fact that other countries take more than 10 minutes to fly across. And this isn’t the first time either:

At one point, da Silva even exhibited a map of his country, which is larger than the continental United States. “Wow! Brazil is big,” Amorim quoted the U.S. President as responding.

I don’t expect him to posses encyclopedic knowledge of square mileage, but I do expect him to be able to appropriately converse with world leaders. His locker room towel-snapping routine (“Yo Blair!”) is (or should be) embarrassing to all Americans, and reminds me of a line from, of all places, Melrose Place, in which Peter Burns chastises Michael Mancini for, well, being Michael Mancini:

“I’m the chief of staff of this hospital, not your fraternity brother, Mancini.”

Putin already aired Bush out, so who’s going to explain this one to him?

Previously: Big and Far