President George W. Bush was assailed by flying shoes and insults, courtesy of Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi. “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”said Zaidi, to which President Bush replied, "Shoe fly, don't bother me."
President Bush, being the model of calm, cool leadership and heroism, dodged the first shoe, but then as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Miliki moved to block the second with his hand, Mr. Bush lunged forward, catching the second shoe right in the numbers, thus protecting his teammate from being called out and simultaneously putting Zaidi out of the game--at least until someone from Muntader al-Zaidi's team catches one of Bush's team's shoes.
The security personnel that had been waiting on the sidelines rushed back into the game and pummeled Zaidi with their shoes. But Zaidi, who the referrees had clearly called out, was refusing to leave the game. As per the rules, this gave the security detail permission to drag Zaidi out to the hallway, from where reporters could hear him being kicked, beaten and sodomized. While I have no evidence that Zaidi was actually sodomized, Toby Keith, who was on the security detail, had been heard by literally dozens of witnesses as early as 2002, threatening to "put a boot in [his] ass," as Mr. Keith put it, because "it's the American way." There is no report as to whether Keith's Tony Lamas or W. Axl Rose's Doc Marten's were used in the alleged sodomy, but Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, an independent television station, owned by Prime Minister Miliki's very own Dawa Party, reported that, “he [Zaidi] was crying like a woman.” A source, close to a source, close to a source, who sits in the stall next to Mahammed Taher during his daily constitutional, said that Taher added under his breath that Zaidi would "be shitting boot polish and decorative stitching for a month of Ramadans."
I have no idea how long that is.
It is considered an insult to hit people with your shoes by Arabic people. According to tradition, this places them lower than your feet, down in the dirt, crawling in the sand, wrestling in the mud with 40 impure women, all of whom refuse to wear a head covering. It is the quintessential mid-eastern atomic wedgie, being pantsed in front of the cheerleading squad and being refused a bailout that was less than one-tenth of what AIG asked for and got, no questions asked, all rolled into one. In short, it is one heavy-duty insult.
And you thought Imelda Marcos took her shoes seriously.
Monday, December 15, 2008
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2 comments:
Well put
I frankly didn't know how to put it. On the one hand, here's a guy that dragged our country into an unnecessary war, broke a sacred tradition of not torturing our enemies, and who is guilty on all counts that the reporter accused him. But our constitution requires that we treat people, regardless of the crimes they are accused of, with a minimum standard of decency. You don't throw things at foreign delegates, no matter how monstrous they are. On the other hand, the reporter is being held without charge, has had his eye damaged and his hand broken. So he's being tortured and mangled for speaking his mind.
The whole thing is wrong-headed. The reporter could have said his piece without assaulting someone. No matter what Bush is guilty of, he doesn't deserve to be brutalized. The reporter probably would have been arrested anyway, but at least he wouldn't have stooped to the Bush/Cheney level of cowboy diplomacy. So he gets the shit kicked out of him by the henchmen of a Bush puppet, who feel just as strongly about the reporter's bad manners as the reporter did about Bush's crimes against humanity. But no one shows any restraint, so widows and orphans continue to be created, anger and resentment grows and we wind up arguing about who was right or wrong, patriotism or conscience, war or peace, when we should be talking about a minimum standard by which everyone is treated.
Violence isn't just inherent in nature, it is built into the fabric of our so-called civilization and there is a deliberate and sustained effort to make certain people targets of that violence, while protecting certain others from it.
What's alarming is that we all seem to be accepting of this in one way or another.
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