Segway Recall Explains Bush's Mishap? Not At All...

Financial Times

When George W. Bush fell off a Segway scooter during a family weekend in Maine this summer, it spawned a thousand jokes about his "lack of balance". But the presidential tumble may actually have been the result of a design fault, it emerged on Friday.

The makers of the revolutionary self-balancing scooter have recalled the 6,000 currently in circulation after reports of riders falling off when the batteries are low.

Such mishaps can occur if "the rider speeds up abruptly, encounters an obstacle or continues to ride after receiving a low battery alert", the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Friday.

The Financial Times appears to be providing a little cover for Bush's escapade. According to the Segway website:

Not having attended orientation (and maybe deciding not to listen to his mother), President Bush did not turn the Segway HT on before climbing aboard (and, we might add, neglected to put down his tennis racket). The result, of course, was that he didn't balance!

So Bush is still a goof despite this recall.

While surfing around for this meme, I saw a lot (and I mean A LOT) of suspicions that this incident was purposely done at the behest of threatened oil companies. That's just silly. This was a simple accident, and here's why: Segway's recall is of about 6000 machines. This number is all consumer, commercial, and test market sales combined. This thing isn't even a blip on Big Oil's horizon. If anything, Bush's tumble helped sales by familarizing more people with the machine. After all, the story was that Bush fell off of a machine designed to keep you on! The Segway was the victim in this story.

So that's two Bush-Segway memes down for the count.