John von Heyking called my attention to this, from former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s memoirs. Bush, according to Schroeder, is a religious fundamentalist, with whom there can be no conversation, just like the fundamentalist elements in the Muslim world.
But, he assures us elsewhere, his criticism of the Bush Administration doesn’t make him anti-American, "[o]therwise, half of US society would be as well." Do you think that the no-holds-barred domestic criticism of the President has licensed these sorts of public statements from foreign figures? And the interviewer from Der Spiegel points out, Schroeder is more tactful regarding Putin (effectively his employer) than he is regarding GWB.
For more on Schroeder’s memoirs (in English), go here. If you read German, there’s more here and here.
What a piece of work, and he became the head of a major Western democracy! His sentence about the "similar tendencies" b/t U.S. Christians and Muslims shows he is either utterly ignorant or utterly insincere/malicious, or some toxic combination of both.