Bush targeted by Iraqi shoe-thrower
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — President Bush made an unannounced, farewell visit Sunday to Baghdad, Iraq, where he met with Iraqi leaders, talked to the news media and made light of the fact that an Iraqi man threw a pair of shoes at him that failed to hit their target.
The latter incident occurred early in the evening in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's palace inside the heavily fortified Green Zone.
The man, whose projectiles sailed past Bush's head, was grabbed and dragged out screaming.
As the man continued to scream from another room, Bush said, "That was a size 10 shoe he threw at me you may want to know."
Among Arab culture, crossing one's legs so that the bottom of one's shoes faces another person or throwing one's shoes at another is considered an insult.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
