Hey! Someone finally had the balls to throw a shoe at George Bush. My money was on Helen Thomas, but I’ll take what I can get. I didn’t expect Bush to have an epiphany. I don’t expect him to even spell epiphany. But you gotta love his titanic-like refusal to acknowledge that it was more than an isolated incident. The journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at Bush this morning, should get a Pulitzer. Here’s an unsurprising quote, courtesy of the NYT: “A statement from Mr. Maliki’s government described the shoe-throwing as a “shameful, savage act that is not related to journalism in any way.” Really? It happened during a press conference, it was the act of a journalist, and it was reported globally. There’s more than one way to file a story, old boy. Oh yeah, if that wasn’t enough, it spurred massive demonstrations of support in the streets of Baghdad. Sounds like journalism with a capital J. If there was any doubt about how close Bush and Maliki are in their complete disdain for reality, read that quote a few times.
Frank Zappa once said: “You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream”, and sometimes you need to throw a shoe to get your point across. And sometimes it is like throwing a shoe at a brick wall. This particular “wall” is twice as thick and twice as dumb as your average wall, but a wall none the less. If only ol’ Bushie was as quick with the foreign policy comebacks as he is with the shoe jokes. What a different world we might be living in today.
petebrunelli 