UPDATE: Iraqi journalist throws shoes at Bush

[Author’s Note:  The following was published at 2:30 pm yesterday as an update to my original article – on Obama insisting that the US has only one president at a time and Bush trying desperately to seem relevant – which was published earlier at 5:19 am.] 

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Poor George, he just can’t get no respect.

After all, during a press conference, at which he and Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki heralded a long-term security agreement between the US and Iraq, President Bush was forced to duck for cover after an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes (both of them) at the beleaguered president. And, evidently to add insult to injury, this shoe bomber reportedly shouted:

This is your farewell kiss … from the widows and orphans you killed in Iraq … you dog.

Clearly, this is not what Bush had in mind when he insisted – at the beginning of the Iraq war – that Iraqis will greet him as a liberator.

In fact, it speaks volumes that – even with the most powerful army in the world guarding him – Bush dares not venture outside Iraq’s Green Zone, which is more fortified than Fort Knox. By contrast, his nemesis, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad travels without fear all over the country. And, ironically, it is he who is greeted everywhere as a liberator.

Meanwhile, in Iraqi culture, hurling a shoe at someone is worse than saying “F*** you, you son of a bitch!” And I have no doubt that this avenging Iraqi was expressing the simmering rage and contempt of millions of others in his country and throughout the Arab world. 

Of course, the irony should not be lost on anyone that the only other person deemed worthy to suffer such international humiliation was former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In his case, however, it was Saddam’s statue, not he himself, that was the target of the contemptuous shoe kiss off….

At any rate, Bush deserves commendation for displaying such impressive agility by dodging those shoes that came at him like US cruise missiles.