There are millions of Americans who applauded the shoe-thrower. (I was one of them.)

He did what many of us would have liked to do.

You go, dude......

since GW did screw so much of this up and it never should have occurred, but at the same time, he should also realize that if he had done that to Saddam Hussein he would now be dead.

There is absolutely NO risk to lionizing the journalist. Muntadhar al-Zeidi is a hero across the Middle East and for good reason.

The young man is emblamatic of the entire experience across Iraq. He went to school under a Saddam Hussein-controlled Iraq. He started working for a paper almost as soon as the U.S. rolled into Iraq.

He has since seen the fall of Saddam, the illegal invasion of us, the United States, the uprising, the ensuing chaos, Fallujah, the insurgency, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children killed, widows, the so-called awakening, progress, timetables, treaties signed then ignored, and no sign of us ever leaving.

In the interim he has been kidnapped, had to interview those left behind, has seen children horrifically burned and had to pretend as if the whole farce was real and had a point.

He is precisely at the right age, 28, to be between the young militants blowing themselves up and the older, professional class in their 30s and 40s who fled the country.

As such he had to sit in a press conference with President Bush, the man largely responsible for this whole mess, and Nouri al-Maliki.

In the midst of Bush giving a speech talking about his "goodbye act" to the Iraqi people this young man took the only sane action there was at the time: he threw a shoe at Bush in a sign of great disrespect.

He did not blow himself as many others have, he did not take to killing, he did not give in to a cult of death predicated upon our illegal invasion.

No he simply gave Bush the greatest sign of disrespect his culture can imagine for unleashing the forces of sectarian division, cultural warfare (between us and them) and a generation of orphans which will last another 4 decades.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi might be the only hero in this whole thing from 2003 onwards. Bush should slink home with his tail between his legs. This young man has not only embarassed him but written his historical elegy in the Middle East for years to come.

as the profound ass george will continuously demonstrates, politics and sport are somewhat linked. considering the accuracy of BOTH throws, can we hope to see Muntader at spring tryouts, at least for the Royals?

FINALLY, someone made a statement against that "dog"!

I must honestly say that Iraqi journalist and protester Muntadar al-Zaidi is my man of the hour for doing what so many of us across the world would like to do -- publicly punish george w. bush (capitalization deliberately withdrawn) for his many crimes against humanity. Even if it's just a shoe, it's the shoe legions of us would like to throw.

I only wish he'd hit him hard in his stupid smirking face.

It galls me to think that Chimpy McFlightsuit is going to sail off to a life of privilege and riches after bringing death, destruction, and misery to millions. In my humble opinion, the Furies ought to smite him with a great big shoe every day for the rest of his miserable life.

...the dummy ducked...

...now all of those guys are going to have to take their shoes off too...

What risk? Is the government monitoring Salon comments?

First let me ad emphatic hosannas to all of the letter writers above. I would like everyone who feels the same to send a shoe to this brave young man in support.

And it is too bad that he didn't connect.

Bush, I think, is at least dimly aware he is hated by millions of people all over the world. I actually think he gets off on it. His smirk was much in evidence during this incident.

He speaks and acts for all of us who can't get nearly close enough to the Chimp to make the same gesture.

I seem to recall that no one would have attmepted it, because the presumed penalty was something along the lines of "the reporter gets smeared in butter and then fed to Uday's hungy lions in his backyard; the reporter's family is shot, and the village where the reporter grew up is sprayed with chemical weapons." Have I got that pretty much right?

My next question is what in God's name would be the reaction if I were to, say, throw a shoe, at Obama. (Of course a shoe might not have the same symbolic value. Perhaps a deed to Rezko's property next door. Or a tape of ROD BLAGOJEVICH talking to ADVISOR No. 1, Rahm Emanuel.) If I were to hurl something like that at the President-Elect, while he stood at the lectern (the lectrern emblazoned, "Office of the President-Elect), I don't think anyone would be trying to figure out the larger meaning and motivations of "the Conservative Street," or my Federalist Society membership, or anything else. I'd be quickly condemened, and laughed off as a nasty, violent, but ultimately harmless, nutcase.

Too bad, I suppose, that I am not an Arabic nutcase, with ties to Saddam. Then, I presume, the left-leaning American mainstream media might take interest in my story.

...mail a shoe to the white house.

It's too bad (for you) that Obama's not a war criminal. If he were, I'd applaud your action.

Of course, if he were a war criminal you'd probably love him, like you do Bush.

Give me a break. Saddam Hussein was a horrific man, a truly terrible dictator. BUT he had a functioning country.

Are we know only holding ourselves up to the standard of Saddam Hussein? Great. Real impressive. I seem to remember something (between the Bush/Cheney insistence that the CIA HAD indeed found evidence of WMDs, and nuclear, gasp!, material from Niger and Dumbya's whining about how he tried to kill my daddy) about democracy flowering in the Middle East. About being greeted as liberators. About the war paying for itself.

What are you freakin kidding me? Did you SEE the pictures at Abu Gharab? Are you at ALL aware of what we have unleashed, in terms of destroying a country, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of American young men and women, and screwing our OWN position not only in the region but the Middle East for decades to come?

So, whatever the punishment for this in Saddam's Iraq was, I would guess it was somewhere on the level of Abu Gharab (where we tortured, sodomized and dehumanized people to the point that even the TAME pictures that came out of there were more than the public could take), Guantanamo where we enacted torture on the level of the Middle Ages or some of these still undisclosed prison detainment camps we admit we run outside of the U.S. but won't tell what was going on.

We stripped men down, naked, piled them on top of each other and took pictures with them and dogs in them. God only KNOWS what we were using the dogs for.

No I'm afraid you can't make that argument anymore Elephantman. I would tell you we've blown a great part of our moral standing in the world as a force for good and the leader of democracy across the world, but you wouldn't even know what that means. So never mind.