And He Thought The Irish Reporter Was Tough
The BBC reports that Shoes thrown at Bush on Iraq trip
A surprise visit by US President George Bush to Iraq has been overshadowed by an incident in which two shoes were thrown at him during a news conference.
An Iraqi journalist was wrestled to the floor by security guards after he called Mr Bush “a dog” and threw his footwear, just missing the president.
The soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture.
I think he can forget having a street named in his honor.
24 comments
As I noted in my post subject… the shoe is off the other foot now.
Ahmadinejad will probably hire the reporter as a press spokesman, if Al Jazeera doesn’t give him his own show.
‘The Bushit Artist'(tm) could have a cemetery named after him. Something appropriate where the World can bury their most despised dead. Like paedophiles, murderers, corporate exec’s, politicians, etc. Could start a World trend! something like… ‘The Bush Legacy Cemetery for Politicians and Evil Criminals Inc.” (TBLCPEC Corp. maybe? Hmmm… needs work.) Wonder if I can get that registered (maybe in Delaware, they are very flexible with company creation I hear). Would have to be a bloody big cemetery! No, wait… Since nobody would ever visit (guilt by association and once there, you never leave), could just be a couple acres and drop a bunker buster in the middle. Then you have a really big hole and all you’d need are some of those huge mining bulldozers. Once it’s full, put a big park or reserve over it. Since nothing would grow there, or would just be very twisted and die, could call it something like ‘The Bush Haven for Nightmares and Destroyed Dreams’. I could make a killing! And the franchise possibilities are endless… Tours (from a safe distance in APC’s with full protective gear) The kids would love it! Could give them slingshots and glass balls full of Holy water to shoot at Bushmorons’s & Darth Cheney’s eventual burial plot on either side of the main gate (better than a pair of rabid huge guard dogs). They deserve their own special plots to make them easy targets for people who want to vent their feelings. The holy water won’t torment their souls of course since they don’t have one. It’s just for effect and fun for the kids. 🙂 Vendors selling T-shirts, Caps, dart boards (child safe of course) bumper stickers, knick-knacks, effigies, snacks (Bush & Cheney all day suckers)! Also need a very special place for Rove and all the wingnuts like O’Reilly, Malkin, Coulter… the list is almost endless! I could make Disney look like a bunch of two-bit con artists! Oh, wait… they are. Well, they can have a place of honour in the ‘Bush Hell Pit'(tm) (Hey, I like that name!) 😀 It could kick the World economy into overdrive in no time!
Bush/Cheney/Rove et al could actually achieve something in death they never have alive… Be useful and make decent people happy! LOL
Mmmmmmmmmm… My heart is all a flutter! And I may start salivating… I think I’m having a Homer doughnut moment! I think I’ll go lay down and rest a bit. Maybe I’ll go dream about ‘What a Wonderful World It Could Be Enterprises Inc.'(tm) *sigh* I guess I’m just another Capitalist at heart after all! LMAO
Piñatas, adult diapers, colostomy bags, urine sample cups, ecological effigies for burning, urinal targets, toilet paper, pet clean up bags, door mats, septic tank covers, figurines for pet parks, – lots of opportunities in your concept Kryten.
You could probably get land at an existing toxic waste site that needs capping for next to nothing and having the remains buried by people in bio-hazard suits will add to the ambiance.
Hey yeah!! That’s a great idea m8! Kill two birds with one cemetery! LMAO Yeah… would be a perfect place to bury all the toxic & nuclear waste. 🙂 It’d be useless for anything else for all eternity with that lot buried there in any case. 🙂
Good thinking! So… you wanna be partners or a JV? You could handle some of the franchises! You could run the Northern hemisphere franchise (which as it’s their home hemisphere would be the lions share, but that’s OK, I’m not greedy) from Florida! 😀 😉
I was having a bad day when I awoke this morning… Now for some strange reason, I’m feeling so much better and cheery! And given my history, talking about death normally depresses me. I guess I found a cure for that! 😀
Death can have it’s advantages after all. When appropriately applied to the most deserving entities. LOL
Errrrmmm…. Moderation? Whafor? What’d I say??! I didn’t even swear or say poo or nuffink! And not even 1 lousy link! Hmmmmph. Your blog hoster a friend of the Bushites or summin? Hmmp! 😐
I just updated the software today, but I can’t see any reason for that comment to kicked into moderation. Normally that only happens when someone misspells their e-mail address so it isn’t recognized. A limited number of words can get something kicked into the spam list, but your post was in the moderation list and the only reason that would normally happen is more than 5 links.
I expect to see a new maintenance update in a week that will correct that and another small anomaly in the back-up program.
Bear with it.
If I tried to market anything anti-Shrubbery in this area I would be used as a piñata, if not an effigy. That sort of operation requires LA or New York not the Florida Panhandle with 80% Republican registration, it sounds like a winner, and the US loves Australian accents. Any of your film makers looking for a quick buck should turn out a few weird comedies with an Australian lead. Kangaroos and koalas sell in this country. Steve Irwin was a cult figure here, an icon for crazy Aussies. Just play to the stereotypes and you will make money.
All of the Bush merchandise could be a tie in to a slap stick comedy. Escaping from TSA and CIA are always good for a few laughs. You have camels in Australia so that would provide a link for a misunderstanding with US officials about being terrorists.
LOL 😉 Yeah… I read earlier you’d just updated WP, so I thought I’d post a comment for fun when I noticed the previous comment went to mod. 😀
Re: marketing anti-Bushite merchandise… Don’t forget to take into account ‘enlightened self-interest’! And besides, Rove isn’t the only one who can use propaganda. And he’s not even very good at it. He only appealed (for the most part) to the morons and rednecks (often one and the same). You know darned well that all you have to do is appeal to their stupidity and base needs, and throw copious amounts of money around, and you are suddenly their bestest friend in da whole World and can ‘Do NO Wrong, Evah!'(tm) (at least, until the money stops. Loyalty does have it’s price). 😉 You could create the ‘Big Dick Memorial Shooting Range’ (once the toxic waste has been dumped there), and you solve two problems at once… eventually, you can have mutant hunting tours, and it won’t just be because they are all inbred). LOL
The possibilities are really endless! 😀 And the World will (in time) be a much better place! 🙂
OK. So… You have the NSA snooping here I guess, huh? *sigh*
Hmmm. Thinking about it, you could sweeten the deal by throwing a few cases of cheap ammo and bud or coors (or whatever), and I know a brilliant 3D artist that can have realistic video representations of the morons fave vacuum heads (O’Rielly, Coulter, Malkin, Limbaugh, etc. And they’d look more lifelike than the real deal, who always looked dead to me), spouting a half dozen or so inane rants that appeal to their moronic minds on their very own 24/7 channel (carefully designed so that only the GOP lovers can get the channel. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for massive brain hemorrhages in the rational, sane public) Throw in some episodes of Simpson, Family Man, American Dad, one of the wingnut preachers telling them every Sunday how evil the rest of the World is, and mud wrestling bimbo’s, and they’ll all be in heaven! So long as the preacher has a guaranteed income of about a million a year, they’ll be putty in your hands! 😀
There’s always a solution. 😉 I think I read that somewhere. LOL
It’s kind of how we all feel at this point.
It will be interesting to note how history records this new low in the Bush Presidency. “President Bush went out with a record low approval rating and a pair of size 10 shoes”.
He deserves to have this happen to him where ever he goes, everyday, for the rest of his life.
Hey, the dude was just saying “shoo!” but as someone with a limited English vocabulary, “shoe” was the closest word he could find in his English-Arabic dictionary ;-).
According to a report at Juan Cole’s place he actually referred to the Shrubbery is “ibn al-kabl” which directly translates as “son of a bitch”. I could be nasty and wonder where a reporter from Baghdad would have met Barbara Bush, but I won’t because that would be wrong.
It is really amazing that the Shrubbery doesn’t really “get” how bad what happened is in the Arab world. The “Arab in the street” just hated him before, now they have moved on to contempt and ridicule, he has moved from awful to offal in this one act.
They are reporting that Ms Perrino has a black eye as the result of being hit while taking cover during the incident which does disprove one of my assumptions – that she had no blood flow to her head.
I doubt our sorry excuse for a president even realizes he has been insulted. He probably thinks the guy threw shes because he couldn`t bring flowers.
I know Josh Marshall’s name is not a welcome sight on this site, so I won’t link the post, but his quip was just too good to pass up:
Right… why does the insulting nature of the gesture require explaining by all our pundits?
I get a definite feeling you’re right, Andante. I don’t think he understands that feuds and wars have started over the action because it is considered so insulting.
They have to explain it, Steve, because they don’t understand it, and assume that everyone is just as ignorant as they and their President are.
In the Air Force “cultural awareness” pamphlet for the Middle East, they warned us not to cross our legs when sitting because we might expose the sole of a shoe “which is highly insulting in the Arabic culture”. I was in the Air Force in the 1960s and 70s. When the Air Force puts it in a pamphlet, it is not exactly a little known fact. It generally indicates more than one major incident as a result of the behavior.
You are correct Bryan. Before each ME mission I undertook, we were given an awareness refresher course by two ME experts (one was a Turk, the other a Soudi). We were also told always to keep our feet flat on the ground. There was only one exception ever, when kneeling for prayers with head bowed facing East (and that exception was mainly for Westerners because we generally wore trousers that couldn’t be pulled over our feet to hide them as they could with their Thobe & Jubba robes etc. Though if we were in prayer and couldn’t hide our feet, we were expected to do so at the very back to minimize the risk of insult. Some people are very easily insulted. and Not all Imam’s (or fundi Muslims) approve of the exception.
They showed the incident on out evening news, and the Bushmoron was making jokes about it and genuinely didn’t seem to care. The guy is so awesomely ignorant and stupid it boggles the mind. Most of the news pundits here have been joking also, with things like “The Iraq press just gave G.W. Bush the boot”. etc. LOL
What’s that saying… No sense, no feelings? What a moron.
I would really like to know if we are paying the salary of a White House “protocol officer”, because that has been a standard job for years, informing the President of the cultural norms of others to avoid embarrassing situations. If there is one, I want the salary re-paid, because this is the least culturally aware White House we have ever had, and that includes Andy Jackson, who was about as crude as any American who ever visited another country wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a straw hat.
He really doesn’t understand that he was insulted.
Hmmmm. Maybe someone finally made Bushmoron understand what happened.
From a BBC news report on YouTube, via C&L:
Shoe Throwing Reporter’s Brother Say He Has Been Severely Injured!
It’s also curious that nobody really seems to understand how serious and important the incident was. The Iraqi reporter has become a hero to many angry Iraqi’s who were just waiting for an excuse to do something about their anger and frustrations. If in fact he has been mistreated and harmed, it could blow up in everyone’s faces. If people thought Iraq was divided before, it has the potential with this single event to become a lot worse. It’s also obvious that the Brit’s (some of them anyway) are enjoying it. 🙂
Patrols have been bombarded with shoes in Fallujah and other cities. People are out in the street, the parliament is becoming more about brawling than talking, a Saudi has offered $10 million for the shoes, rival cobblers are claiming to have made them – things are certainly stirred up and provincial elections are on the horizon.
There are, of course, a number of shoe throwing games already up on the ‘Net in multiple languages.
If the guy makes it out of the Iraqi “justice” system alive, he will have no trouble getting a job.
Well, I just had to post this (and to test out your new hipparchia soporific) 😉
Thanks to Logan Murphy at C&L.
Oh… and speaking of games the incident has generated, you mean like this one? 😀
Sock and Awe
Must be Christmas! LOL The gift that just keeps on giving… yeah!
The limit on images was a spam related thing, but I noticed that you didn’t get “moderated”, so maybe that’s over too.
Yeah, I expect the “shoe” to follow the Shrubbery for a very long time, and if JEB runs for the Florida Senate, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to have people take some old flip-flops to his events.