And, apparently, someone from Daily Kos got in there as well:
President George W. Bush flew to Iraq on Sunday, his fourth and final trip to highlight the recently completed security agreement between the United States and the country that has occupied the bulk of his presidency and will to a large extent define his legacy.
But his appearance at a news conference here was interrupted by an Iraqi journalist who shouted in Arabic — “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog” — and threw one of his shoes at the president, who ducked and narrowly avoided being struck.
As chaos ensued, he threw his other shoe, shouting, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” The second shoe also narrowly missed Bush as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki stuck out a hand in front of the president’s face to help shield him.
A scrum of security agents descended on the man, who was about 12 feet from the lectern, and wrestled him to the floor and then out of the ornate room where the news conference was taking place. The president was uninjured and brushed off the incident. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said jokingly before continuing his news conference and noting the apologies of Iraqi journalists in the front row.
Shortly before 10 p.m., Bush departed the Green Zone by helicopter to Camp Victory, where he was greeted with cheers and whoops from hundreds of troops inside the enormous rotunda of the Al Faw palace. Speaking at a lectern beneath an enormous American flag that nearly reached the domed ceiling, he praised this generation of soldiers and reflected on the sacrifice of those who had died.
He called the surge “one of the greatest successes in the history of the United States military.”
“Thanks to you,” he told the soldiers, “the Iraq we’re standing in today is dramatically freer, dramatically safer and dramatically better than the Iraq we found eight years ago.”
On the flipside of that kook with the shoe, other Iraqi journalists offered their apologies to President Bush, who made light of the incident with a joke about the size of the shoe. And thus democracy to Iraq – and, in fact, perhaps better democracy than we have, as I doubt any of us would get away with tossing a shoe at the President, this one or the next. I mean, come on, which of us hasn’t wanted to chuck something at a President from time to time?
At any rate, God bless President Bush, our magnificent troops and the brave Iraqi people – including the screwball with the shoe. We’ve done well and the world is a better place for what we’ve done.
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