There's been a lot of yukking over the last eight years over the clownish ineptitude of the man who has occupied the White House during that time. From the right and the press, it's been a kind of jolly-good-fellow bonhomie that one has for the guy in the frat house who may get shit-faced drunk every night, but he's so much fun no one cares that he's an alcoholic. From the left it's been the kind of appalled amusement, tinged with a sense of superiority, that one has when presented with someone who's clearly an intellectual lightweight out of his league.
But despite the many parody YouTube videos people are making spoofing the image of George W. Bush ducking footwear projectiles:
...I'm not laughing.
It isn't that I think George W. Bush deserves to be treated with respect. The only surprise is really why it took so long for someone to make a gesture like this; and why it didn't come from someone in our own press corps -- the very same press corps that has been so enthralled with him for so long. On Monday, reporting on the incident on Countdown, Howard Fineman had the shell-shocked look of someone who had escaped an abusive marriage and was only now realizing just how bad it had been.
It isn't that I think the Iraqis ought to be grateful to us for wrecking their country and that they should be groveling at Bush's feet. I'm frankly surprised that this was as violent as it got for him over there.
I think it's that watching this mean, small man having to duck shoes being thrown at him, as if he were (as Olbermann noted) the Blues Brothers playing "Gimme Some Lovin'" at Bob's Country Bunker was an encapsulated vision of just how diminished America is as a force in the world, just how extensively this president has destroyed whatever moral authority we may have had. After all, we allowed this man to be president for eight years. Those shoes were not just thrown at him, they were thrown at all of us.
This year we dodged a bullet in that there weren't enough people who think being smart is a bad thing and that willful ignorance and bigotry are admirable traits to give us four more years of Bush in the form of John McCain and the person who would have been the public face of his administration, Sarah Palin. But as we've now seen, the forces of meanness and stupidity have not gone away. Palin is already the frontrunner for 2012, and Mike Huckabee is the same sour soup in a slightly more affable package. Already the media, smelling blood, are circling Barack Obama like hungry sharks, gleeful for the opportunity to try to bring down another Democratic president.
The image of a man who never should have been president finally getting what he deserves from an angry Iraqi journalist should haunt us for decades to come, to remind us what we have in store if we ever allow someone like this to become president again.
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