This is the President. Get Used to It: The Root

Quoted via The Root:

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhen an outraged Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush during a visit to Baghdad, the incident was fodder for jokes and snickers. Mostly we laughed at the president’s lightning-quick reaction and the failure of the Secret Service to stop the guy from throwing not one, but two shoes. But even those of us who believe that President Bush is among the nation’s worst presidents reacted with a mixture of shock and genuine concern that the president of the United States had been so powerfully humiliated and potentially endangered. (Thank goodness it was only a shoe.)

To have an Iraqi throw a shoe at him in Baghdad might have been a fitting metaphor for Bush’s disastrous policies, but as an event in real-time, in which the president of the United States had to duck for cover to keep from getting beaned by a pair of powerfully lobbed missiles, it wasn’t that funny. The shoe-thrower, of course, was an Iraqi whose country had been leveled on the basis of a contrived threat, promoted by that U.S. president. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have reportedly been killed since American bombs first fell in 2003. This doesn’t make the journalist’s attempted assault on the president excusable, but somewhat understandable. The fact that the shoe-thrower was criminally tried and convicted (and released only last week) suggests that he paid a very dear price for his moment of guerilla theater.

When a verbal shoe is thrown at the president by a member of the U.S. Congress, in a joint session of Congress, there is nothing that can explain or excuse it. This is not Iraq. And Rep. Joe Wilson is not a disgruntled citizen in an occupied and defeated nation. He’s a highly paid U.S. congressman in a free and Democratic country, with a host of legitimate means at his disposal to have his views heard by the president of the United States. more