Bush Keeps Cool as the Shoes Fly

RUSH: Here’s Cameron in Hartford, Connecticut. Cameron, thank you for waiting. I appreciate your patience.

CALLER: Well, it’s grand to be on following the vice president.

RUSH: And a huge responsibility.

CALLER: Goody two-shoes dittos, and I wanted to mention and ask you if you might agree that this display of strength by our president yesterday when someone stood up and started hurling things at him, which could have been shoe bombs, I suppose, will we ever see this kind of reaction in the future by future presidents and their secret security details? I mean, when you think about it, think back to when he went out in Yankee Stadium, walked out to the mound solo after 9/11/01.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And walked by himself to the mound and threw a strike. There’s an inner strength that this man has, that regardless of any of his other foibles, comes through in a way which I don’t think we’ll see again.

RUSH: You raise an interesting point about this. One of the things that I’ve noticed, the Drive-Bys are ecstatic with this. The Drive-Bys think it’s the coolest thing in the world, wish they’d have done it themselves. They’re thankful for this guy who threw the shoe and they’ve gone into great detail explaining that this is one of the most profound insults in the Arab world is the sole of a shoe, filth and dirt, you stomp on your opponent’s face with it and that’s cool, and they’re wishing they coulda done it. This guy is a hero to them. The second thing is I’ve seen the video of it, and just on the face it’s kind of hilarious, but everybody is asking, ‘Why didn’t the Secret Service act sooner?’ They did. What people don’t know is Bush told the secret service, get away, you saw what happened, some loco weed threw a shoe. It was Bush who kept that room under control by keeping the Secret Service from moving in there and uprooting everybody and throwing them out.

Now, your question about will we see this again, here’s what you have to ask yourself: Let’s imagine here that rather than President Bush it’s Obama somewhere in the Arab world and some reporter from some Arab news agency decides to throw their shoe at Obama, and let’s say that Obama, the same thing happens, he ducks, gets out of the way. Who can know, who can project the future, but I would be pretty confident in suggesting that the media would take after whoever did it and personally string the guy up. There would be no praise for the guy, there would be no admiration for the guy, and the news coverage would be ‘how dare they,’ and Obama I think would probably try to play it down, while at the same time suggesting this is just something not done to heads of state and so forth, and probably fire somebody on the Secret Service while nobody is looking and that kind of thing. We don’t know. That’s just a wild guess. Thanks for the call out there, Cameron.