Sup Wit Shoe?

What a bizarre yet simple twist of fate this is. President Bush was never so powerful or popular as he was in April of 2003, when Iraqis pelted statues of Saddam Hussein with their shoes in what was essentially the best 1940's-style newsreel footage of all time.

Alas, we have since grown to understand the Iraqis' rage more fully with the passage of time, and we have realized that they have shoes not just for Saddam, but for us, and indeed for themselves.

As for the attacker, I can not muster any particularly rational argument against what he did. I feel that legally and intellectually and morally, it is hard to argue against any Iraqi's right to attack any servant of the American government which invaded and occupied their country, regardless of professed intentions.

So my problem is not with the attacker. In fact, I admire his courage and his aim. Surely he knew he would go to prison for assaulting the President of the United States. But he did it. And he knew that he could not possible kill Bush. All things considered, most acts of violence are far more cowardly than this one was.

Still, I took absolutely no joy in seeing this spectacle, though I'm sure that many Bush-haters did. The reason I did not find this entertaining in the least bit is two fold.

The first is that I do not hate George Bush. I hate very few people, in fact. And this occasion reminded me of the few things I actually respect about Bush, specifically his physical prowess and his sense of humor.

I admire the fact that Bush keeps in shape, and let me tell you, no other president we've ever had (except for the one we're about to have....yes the fuck We Did) could have dodged that shoe. Bush was on some cougar shit there. And he laughed about it afterwards. While I don't respect Bush's brand of humor, I respect that he appreciates the value of laughter.

The second reason for my sobriety around this YouTube riot is that this was a physical assault on the presidency and I was extremely unimpressed with the quality of the security.

I understand that the media room is supposed to be the "safe area", when the security work is essentially done because every person has been thoroughly searched and nobody else can enter. I get that but, not to be impolitic, when you're in fucking Baghdad in a room full of Iraqis, you might want to step your game up and assume ill will from everybody in the room.

The simple fact is that a man assaulted the president with something that could have injured him, but not killed him (but that could not have been know as the attack unfolded, in this age of the shoe-bomb) and the line of sight between the attacker and the president was unbroken even as another object was hurled by the same man.

I don't know enough about professional security to know whether my critique has any merit, but I know enough about my own intuition to know that it unnerved me.

It takes not a leap but a simple skip in imagination to consider what would've happened if that first shoe had struck the president squarely in the face, visibly exposed blood, and knocked him off his feet. I'm here to tell you that wars have started over less.

All those overly-wrought nerdy analyses aside, it somehow just made perfect sense. An Iraqi man physically assault the President while condemning him for civilian casualties and calling him a dog, and Bush's honest response was to smile and turn the whole thing into another act of persecution in the test of trials that all great men must navigate, all the more proof that he was right all along and shall eventually be redeemed.