It’s the shoes!
First, the main reason “journalists” in Saddam’s Iraq would never have thrown a shoe at a visiting dignitary is that they’d be tortured and executed for it. More importantly, can we just drop this fantasy-land nonsense that America was super-popular in the Mideast before George W. Bush came on the scene? I mean really, who is Reuters trying to kid?
Also, if someone throws a shoe at Barack Obama — at home or abroad — will that be used by the press to define Obama’s popularity, never mind his legacy? I mean if some nutter in Holland hucks a clog at Obama, does that mean all of the Netherlands, never mind all of Europe, hates Obama? Somehow I doubt that’s how Reuters et al would cover it. In a circumstance like that, we’ll be told how this was an act by one lone-shoe-man.
There’s a weird double standard buried deep in all of this, and I don’t just mean the biases against Bush. When conservatives hold up unsavory Muslims or Arabs as representative of the region’s problems, we’re told how simplistic and two-dimensional we’re being. But when the same sort of unsavory doofus behaves in ways that confirm liberal biases and coform to liberal passions, then suddenly this doofus speaks for millions.