It’s not fair! And I don’t care who that moron was
who first said, “Life isn’t fair.” I’m saying IT IS NOT FAIR THAT IT’S
NOT FAIR. Wait. That might have been Joan Crawford talking to her daughter Christina about always beating her at the swimming matches, in which case she was right. But damn it, it is not fair! Why does an Iraqi
journalist get to throw his shoes at George W. Bush and we can’t? If someone did that here, it would be an act of treason or something and the shoe thrower would be under the ground in a hidden bunker scarily close to Dick Cheney for the rest of his life. There’s probably something in the so-called Patriot Act that would allow for an American citizen who threw shoes at George to rot away forever in a secret place with no legal defense. No, wait … That would be Guantanamo Bay and he would be locked up with everyone else who has ever made it to that list and has never had a shot at a legal defense.
Readers, have you ever seen the film The Bad Seed? One of the best lines in it from the evil little murderer girl is, “LEROY! You’d better give me those shoes!!!!” She said this because she had used them to kill a little boy who beat her in the spelling contest. All of this seems eerily related somehow. George and the little psychotic girl and both of them stomping around demanding their way? It’s all coming together now. Except that the bad little girl is much more articulate. And, sigh, at the end of the film she gets struck by lightning rather than retiring to a tacky subdivision in Dallas. But back to the shoes and the man who threw them … That about sums up Bush’s eight years in office — like sheer poetry. Invade a country that has done nothing to ours; kill, bomb, maim, and torture hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children; tell the people you are coming to liberate them and then occupy and destroy their country; in the process, bankrupt the United States and cause a global financial meltdown; suffer the worst popularity ratings of any president in the history of this country; never apologize for or admit to making mistakes; put your party so far in the tank that they lose the White House; and then make a “final surprise visit” to the country you’ve destroyed and have a journalist hurl his shoes at your face while you are standing at a microphone expecting to be asked questions about all the good you have done.
It’s too bad Condoleezza Rice wasn’t there, so someone who lost everything during Hurricane Katrina could have pelted her with a pair. And they could have blasted Dick Cheney in the face with some shoes that they were really trying to throw at ducks or whatever it was he was hunting for when he shot that guy.
I think that after the election I was so relieved that my mind just turned to mush — or more to mush than it already was — and I ALMOST started to feel sorry for George because he has been such a miserable failure that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be in his shoes (ha ha!) for the rest of his life. But now it’s starting to sink in that his entire regime is now going to be going away and there’s good reason why he’s probably not going to get the book deals and massive support for his presidential library and even better reasons why he won’t be out there making millions on the public and private speaking circuit. He can’t thread two coherent sentences together. You would think that after eight years of being the president, and being married to a former school teacher, he would have made some kind of progress somewhere along the way, but it just didn’t happen. It scares me to know that we have to wait until January 20th, when he and his minions are finally shown the door. Not that things are going to change overnight, but at least he’ll be out of sight and not causing so much damage that foreign journalists are throwing shoes at him. Bless that journalist’s soles.
