Shoes

In the Post-Dispatch today, Fatemeh Keshavarz, chair of the Dept. of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Wash. U., writes perceptively about the implications of the shoes thrown (see above) at President Bush on Sunday:

Please do not get me wrong. Insulting heads of state is not all right, particularly when they are your guests. The point is not to justify such inappropriate and discourteous moves; it is to understand them, rather than dismiss them.

Over at the First Things blog, they've got other ideas:

The best part of the George Bush Shoe Incident is definitely the President’s priceless one-liner: “I saw into his sole.”

That’s about as funny as puns get. If sense of humor is a good rough guide to intelligence, then either Bush is really pretty smart or has a pretty smart aide.

Yeah, Bush deserves the Nobel Prize for that one.

I love, too, the phony caveat "or has a pretty smart aide." You see, even if W.'s not smart, he knows how to surround himself with smart people!