Hello, Keep Your Shoes to Yourself
I don't care what anyone says. No one has a right to throw anything at anyone unless it is a bouquet at a wedding or something else of value, and it is the same for President Bush and the shoe-throwing incident. This includes all forms of hurling the things across the room, too whether it is in person or in a video game.
I know it is a freedom of speech issue founded by the non shoe-throwing founding fathers but that doesn't mean that common decency should go flailing across the room, too. Besides, there are other ways of registering disdain for another person like confiding in a friend, posting an entry in a journal or in the case of a public figure, writing a letter or staging a protest or demonstration.
While I don't like to see people getting killed (except for terrorists, Nazis or skinheads, which are pretty much the same thing) I was one of the .000876% of the population who thought that we should have gone into Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein just for being a lunatic, a madman and one heck of a nutty guy.
Because there were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq many people (mostly liberals) now say we never should have sent our troops there; because Bush and the neo-conservatives underestimated the level of effort in Iraq (not so much to depose Saddam but to stabilize the country and keep the elictricity on), and subsequently put one toe in the water years before putting both feet in, the duration of our occupation has consequently been longer than necessary.
The pretext for Iraq and the means by which we've gone about our business there are certainly questionable to say the least. But you raise a good (and forgotten) point. Saddam was a major source of instability in the Middle East; he consistently violated UN (not US)resolutions put in place since the first Gulf War (which Saddam started by invading Kuwait), and he more or less committed genocide against the Kurds (were they among the Arabs celebrating the shoe-throwing journalist, who now regrets his actions?) through the use of chemical weapons.
Thanks to the US, Saddam was forever removed from power - Iraq and the Middle East are better off for it.
Thank you, John Galt. At last, another voice of sanity and reason.