I heard some on TV this morning describing the shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad as a terrible embarrassment for President Bush. I don’t get it. To me he looked great. I mean, here we have the 62 year-old president, ably dodging not just one but two shoes thrown at him from close range. If you watch the video, you can see that he’s already smiling as he comes up from the first dodge. He knows he’s bested the guy. And as Politico reported:

Bush was cool under fire and prevented an even bigger incident by waving off his lead Secret Service agent, who was prepared to extract him from the room.

Make no mistake: This could have been a genuinely embarrassing incident, with Bush getting bopped in the face by a shoe and the press conference ending in disarray and confusion. This Muntazer al-Zaidi guy who threw them could then have claimed some kind of victory. Instead he’s just left there in his socks getting piled on by security guards, with nothing to show but a perfectly composed President Bush who never even left his podium. No doubt everyone’s seen the video but here it is again below.

And later Dubya says something like, “All I can report is a size 10.” He’s cool, he’s unafraid and he’s funny. I’ll take that in an American president any day. I think he gave us very good reason to be proud.

Meanwhile, if, as is being suggested in the media, this shoeless journalist is being “hailed a hero in the Arab world,” then it just highlights some serious problems in that culture. This journalist is a pathetic figure who succeeded in doing nothing other than emoting loudly and humiliating himself. A hero?

I don’t think he should be punished in particular, other than losing his ability to pose as a journalist. But that’s for the Iraqis to work out.

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President Bush’s comfort in the role of a man of action reminds me of the incident on November 16th, 2004, at the APEC summit in Santiago, Chile. The Chilean security people decided to block the president’s personal Secret Service bodyguard from entering the building that the president had just entered. A pushing and shouting match ensued at the door. What does Dubya do? He heads back to the doorway, reaches through the Chilean security guys, grabs his bodyguard and pulls him through. No hesitation, no BS — he just does it. And then goes smiling forward to continue hobnobbing with the other political leaders as if nothing has happened.

And for all the attention it got in the media, you would think that nothing had happened. Can you imagine if Bill Clinton had personally and physically rescued his own Secret Service agent like that? Do you think that it would be virtually ignored by the press? Imagine if Barack Obama did something like that? There would be books written about it and movies made! Oh, well.

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