Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Sailin' Shoes


Amazing, yet fitting, if the presidency of George W. Bush is remembered in the YouTube hive mind for Bush's having shoes fired at him during a press conference in Iraq.

In the big scheme of things, I know Rick Perlstein is right and we shouldn't applaud physical assaults upon heads of state. But I was delighted to see Dubya being nearly pelted by footwear. It's quite poetic, an Iraqi using this Middle Eastern form of insult, little understood by neocon America, and previously seen directed at the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein during the early days of the U.S. invasion. There is a nice karmic symmetry to that. It's also sadly apropos that it took an Iraqi journalist to do what I kept wishing an American reporter would do in a Q&A with Bush: let loose with a burst of visceral rage at the lies and destruction.

Give the President this much credit, he did an impressive job of dodging the shoe whipped at his head from close range. It's a testament to the most unambiguous achievement of his White House career: his keeping himself physically fit.

No comments: