Bush Gets Comeuppance in Baghdad

I was a little out of it on Sunday, so when I saw the first reports about the shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad and I didn’t know if it was real or a Saturday Night Live stunt.

But when my fog cleared, and I saw the footage again, I was amazed at the courage of that reporter.

Knowing that he was going to be arrested, and perhaps worse, he stood up to the most powerful man in the world and hurled not one but two shoes directly at Bush’s head.

That was Arabic for the emperor has no clothes.

Seconds beforehand, Bush had bragged about the Iraq War approaching “a successful end” and being “decisively on its way to being won.” He even reheated some of the boilerplate about Iraq being “a force of freedom and a force for peace in the heart of the Middle East, a country that will serve as a source for stability in a volatile region.”

And he talked about the sacrifices by U.S. troops, coalition troops, and the Iraqi people. But he acted as though the Iraqi people had suffered only because of those who resisted the United States, and not at all because of anything the United States did.

“The Iraqi people have sacrificed a lot,” he said. “They've suffered car bombings and suicide attacks and IEDs, and desperate efforts by terrorists to destroy a young democracy. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have stepped forward to defend this democracy, and many have paid a dear price.”

But hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also lost their lives because of Bush’s actions, as that one Iraqi reporter vividly reminded us.

Now I’m not for violence. But I am for standing up to bullies and brutalizers and mass murderers. That reporter had guts.

On a lighter note, I bow to the humorist Andy Borowitz, who got off the best line when he said that George Steinbrenner had hired that Iraqi journalist to pitch for the Yankees.