Shoe Dodger-In-Chief ... by gimleteye

It wasn't just a Size 10 shoe thrown at President Bush at his final press event in Baghdad, it was the coda to his presidency and the end of a political dynasty.

An Iraqi television journalist insulted an American president with a pair of thrown shoes. Millions of Arabs around the world cheered the humiliation.

But for Americans the coda has a different meaning. We are used to incompetence and bad behavior from public officials including the president of the United States. But this president has been different. Those thrown shoes say, good riddance.

Good riddance, because it is not just the squandering of American treasure-- the dumb, at-loss-for-syntax to explain much of anything that is transpiring -- it is the sense of American power transcribed to a pair of shoes; flimsy, don't weigh much, can be handed down one owner at a time until they fade away, discarded and meaningless.

How bizarre that a president elected for "values" turns out to have presided over so much lost value; of the rule of law, constitutional rights, and now represents a card deck filling with faces of the destroyers of American capital; high flying New York attorney, Richard Dreier, Bernard Madoff, Robert Rubin and Phil Gramm, Franklin Raines, Stan O'Neal, Angelo Mozillo, Richard Fuld and Alan Greenspan, hedge fund operators by the baker's dozen; a deck being shuffled so fast now by events and markets that the cards are springing off in disorder, like shreds of clothing or shoes separated by the force of a blast.

George Bush will soon be retired to watch CNN, Fox and network news' coverage of unfolding events like the rest of us. He will be secure in the knowledge that we are pulled along by force of history more than any one person can determine it. But the outcome for President Bush is not the outcome of a central player in a Shakespearean tragedy; his term seems so much like an inconsequential side-eddy, a whirlpool of small talent; not at all what Karl Rove and Grover Norquist had in mind when George W. Bush was propelled to be the figurehead of the intended Republican century: of limited government, free enterprise and free trade, of commerce where benign patriarchal values of stewardship and personal responsibility would overcome the need of regulation, where good farmers followed warm weather to productive corn and wheat harvests in northern Canada, where the melting Arctic provided new commercial opportunities and manifest destiny in the Northwest Passage.

Now, it is the Democrats' turn. They have a very short time to show nimble dexterity in changing course or they, too, will have squandered a set of vastly narrowed opportunities left to them by the shoe-dodger-in-chief.