"Do you remember the incident with the shoes? Did you see the video?"
"Only about a hundred times. I never got tired of it."
"What I wondered was, where were the security guys?"
"The ones who will throw themselves in front of a shoe? They were over at the side."
"No, they poured out of a door at the back. It was all over by then."
"Wasn't George smiling the whole time? Or was it a grimace? With him, I couldn't always tell."
"Someone said that this will be the iconic moment--it won't be the scene on the battleship with 'Mission Accomplished' in the background, but the shoes whizzing through the air that will sum up all eight years."
"What happened to the guy?"
"He said that when they locked him up, they tortured him. They ended up giving him three years, reduced to one, and then released him three months early for good behavior."
"What's his name? He really flung those shoes."
"Al-Zeidi. Young guy, a journalist. I could see George counting down, he knew the second shoe was coming."
"Probably couldn't take it when Bush started talking about how much the American people had sacrificed, how the war cost us a great deal of time and resources. Must have sounded like W was complaining."
"No, his friends said he'd talked about it before. What he would do if he ever found himself in a room with George Bush."
"Haven't we all?"
"Actually, I decided a long time ago, being fairly timid, that if I was ever in a room listening to George's State of the Union speech or whatever, I would obviously and sorrowfully just shake my head all the way through his speech. In an audience of heads, he'd have to notice."
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