As the world surely knows by now, the lame duck President George W. Bush himself had to duck yesterday in Baghdad when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at him during a press conference. Bush later remarked to journalists:
“I didn’t know what the guy said, but I saw his sole.”
… which is pretty funny if you like puns. As much as I have disliked the president’s policies I have to admit he does have a pretty irreverent sense of humor that I appreciate.
Meanwhile, shoe-thrower Muntadar al-Zaidi has become a folk hero in the Arab world where the symbolism of throwing shoes and calling Bush a dog makes a bigger splash than it otherwise would in the West. I do remember a State Department fact sheet before my ship pulled into Indonesia some 30 years ago explaining that in the Islamic faith the soles of the feet are seen as unclean. Later, while some shipmates and I visited in the Jakarta home of the guy who became our unofficial “taxi driver,” we were all self-conscious about crossing our legs so as to not show our soles. It brought a laugh from our driver who said he was Christian and not Muslim thus it didn’t really matter to him.
Bush, rightly, looked frozen as the reporter threw his shoes. I can’t blame him. If I was as soundly disliked as him around the world and especially in Iraq, I would have still been shaking. After all, one doesn’t know what’s in or on those shoes. It could be a shoe bomb or it could be shoes filled with dung, as in if the foo s**ts wear it. That is not to mention that a couple of shoes might not feel very good when they hit you upside the head. I once saw a 25-pound chair flying through the air toward me in a courtroom when an armed robbery defendant hurled the chair at the crime victim who sat near me. Luckily, no one was injured. So, softy that I am, I feel sorry for Bush as far as that incident goes.
The press, whose job it is to make mountains out of molehills, are now asking why the Secret Service allowed this to happen. But I don’t see how it could have been prevented. Backgrounds checks are run on reporters who attend presidential press conferences and are in press pools — I was in something like 3 or 4 presidential pools — but I have no idea how stringent the background checks are. It’s not like how the feds would check you out if you were being appointed to the Supreme Court. I would suspect it is more on the order of looking up criminal histories on Public Data.com., or when you are stopped for a traffic violation by police.
Short of a psychological profile of each reporter — which I would imagine as something so scary they’d never let journalists near the president — it beats me as to how something like that could be prevented. Reporters and camera people get scanned for weapons so I don’t know. Perhaps the only thing to stop it would be to take the journalists’ shoes and belts away and maybe their tape recorders as well as pens and notepads. I suppose I shouldn’t give the presidents’ folks any ideas though.