Humiliation of a President, The Shoe Incident

President Bush

Presidents Attacker

Earlier this week, I saw a whole clip about all of President Bush’s failures. To be honest, it did not bother me at all. I truly see the man as someone who may have made grand contributions somewhere else, but was certainly not presidential material at all. I have made fun of the guy myself on several occasions. And on each and every occasion, I feel he deserved the criticism. However, more recently when the shoe incident occurred with the Muslim journalist things seem to have changed and strangely I now find myself feeling a bit of a need to defend President Bush.

Why do I feel different about this particular incident? For a few reasons, first, even if you don’t like the man in charge you should still respect the office of the president. This man was elected (for better or for worse) as the president of our country. Not just any country, but the country hailed as being the strongest free nation in the entire world. To allow a journalist to commit such an assault against our leader and to subsequently laugh at the leader rather than being insulted as an American that someone would dare to perpetrate such an act on the man holding our highest office speaks loudly about the shape of America today.

As Americans, I believe we should be angered at this outrage and should be backing our president during this time, not humiliating him. Understand, I do not like GW Bush, I do not believe he is competent, but he is my president. And I do not believe that my president should be target of an assault by some garden variety thug, especially when that thug is just a journalist who was allowed access to the man holding the highest political office in the world.

I am also offended that we are taking part in the laughter. Again, we are Americans. Someone has perpetrated a world scale public insult to our president. And what is our reaction? We laugh at the president and make light of the issue. Does anyone understand that this was not just a public humiliation of GW Bush, but a public humiliation of all of America?

I also feel that for whatever reason this particular incident has lead to an open season on GW Bush. Again, don’t like the guy, think he has less political skill than just about anyone on the planet. But again, he is our leader and to humiliate him on such a grand scale is simply not acceptable. What disturbs me the most is the general acceptance of such bad taste on a grand scale.

To me, the reaction around the incident does not feel like the political cartoons of the past or like the funny photo shopped images that we traditionally see. It feels like a case of insult to injury. First our leader is assailed by an angry Muslim militant, then he is publicly assailed by our own journalist and our people. It’s a sad day in America when we give up our dignity and our national pride in the guise of free speech. The Muslim guy was not asserting his right to free speech or intelligently stating his case, he was attacking our president. He was one of a very select few people in the world with access to our president, with access to ask the man questions directly, but instead of taking advantage of that access and doing his job professionally and intelligently, he chose to attack a world leader. In my eyes, that is a problem and he should be imprisoned for decades as an example of what happens to those who would attack the leader of the strongest nation on earth!

And finally, while I myself see the value in sarcasm and I enjoy political cartoons and satire (look on some previous pages and you will find some). I also believe that this kind of humiliation for our president~~ especially from his own people~~ is over the top and just inappropriate. For me, it’s sort of a family attitude. I have two brothers and a sister. Over the years we have had terrible arguments and have been unkind and cruel to each other on more than one occasion. But I pity the fool who would try to hurt one of us or divide us, we may not always agree, we may not always like each other, but we are ALWAYS family and we ALWAYS love each other. That is the attitude that I believe America should have towards this incident. We may not always agree with who is in charge and we may not always like who is in charge, but he is one of our own and he is one of our American family and we have an obligation to always love and protect our own!