So, what actually happened? First, did Obama flub the oath, if so, did Roberts flub it as well? Lets have a look at the transcript:

ROBERTS: I, Barack Hussein Obama…
OBAMA: I, Barack…
ROBERTS: … do solemnly swear…
OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear…
ROBERTS: … that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully…
OBAMA: … that I will execute…
ROBERTS: … faithfully the office of president of the United States…
OBAMA: … the office of president of the United States faithfully…
ROBERTS: … and will to the best of my ability…
OBAMA: … and will to the best of my ability…
ROBERTS: … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
OBAMA: … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
ROBERTS: So help you God?
OBAMA: So help me God.
ROBERTS: Congratulations, Mr. President.

The transcript makes clear that Justice Roberts made a mistake first, then corrected it, after which President Obama repeated the mistake not the correct version. In other words, both flubbed the oath, Roberts corrected himself, Obama did not.

More important than the flub, though, is that the message stays the same; the meaning of the sentence does not change. Shorter; there’s no use in debating the issue since it doesn’t matter whether Obama flubbed it and if so why.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

“Madame Clinton is a good friend of Afghanistan, a close friend of ours,” Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said. “But if somebody believes that our government, the government of President (Hamid) Karzai is involved as a government entity in the production of drugs, this is absolutely wrong.”

Clinton also descibed the Afghan government as highly “corrupt,” which did not charm her Afghan counterpart either.

The real problem, Spanta told the Associated Press, is that the Afghan government is not in control of Helmand province. This province is one of the most violent of the country. The Taliban are still strong in Helmand where they encourage farmers to produce opium. Part of the opium money is used by the Taliban to buy weapons and influence.

“The main production center of drugs is Helmand, and we are not in charge. Helmand (is) not under control of my government,” Spanta said. “If the international community is serious about fighting drug production and drug trafficking, they have to bring Helmand under our control.”

He added that Kabul only controls the province’s capital and some “islands” of territory around the rest of the region.

There are two sides to Clinton’s remarks; firstly, Afghanistan is a narco-state because the far majority of the world’s opium is produced in this war-torn country. Secondly, the other side of the story is that the Afghan government is no promoting opium production. It has in the past been willing to destroy opium farms but it simply lacks the strength and means to a sizeable part of the country’s opium farms.

Clinton and Spanta should both also keep in mind that opium is the only product farmers in Afghanistan can grow and make a profit. The country is nearly unfriendly to human life. Farmers are not growing poppy because they want to but because they have no alternative.

Rather than destroying these farms and taking their livelihood away from Afghan farmers, Kabul and Washington have to use Afghanistan’s opium for medical purposes. World opium and medicine organizations and businesses have long complained that they cannot get their hands on enough opium for medicinal purposes. Using Afghanistan’s opium for these purposes would help the world and Afghanistan itself.

Lastly, although Afghanistan is the world’s number one opium producing country, Clinton should express herself more carefully. She is no longer campaigning; she will be America’s secretary of state, which means that she will have to improve the country’s relationship with enemies and friends. Insulting them is not helpful.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

“I think you look at each item and see what is a violation of the law and do we even have a right to ignore it,” she told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “And other things that are maybe time that is spent better looking to the future rather than to the past.”

Pelosi’s remarks come shortly after Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he wants to look into whether the Bush administration broke the law by taking the nation to war against Iraq and instituting aggressive anti-terror initiatives.

Conyers called for an “independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities.”

President-Elect Barack Obama told ABC News a week ago that he believes that Washington should look towards the future rather than the past. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he told ABC News a week ago. “On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Pelosi explained that Obama and Conyers are not “that far apart. There are different subjects and you treat them differently.

“We cannot let the politicizing of, for example, the Justice Department to go unreviewed,” she added. “I want to see the truth come forth.”

Although it was an unpopular decision, President Gerald Ford was right not to press charges against President Richard Nixon. Prosecution would have damaged the American people’s faith in government and it would undoubtedly have torn the country apart. Prosecuting top Bush adminstration officials will have the same effect. If Pelosi and Obama are serious about bringing the country together they have to let byones be bygones and focus on the future.

Pelosi and Obama are not the same kind of politician, however. Where Obama ran as a moderate last year, Pelosi is known as an ideoligical liberal partisan hack who detests compromise. If one Democrat is indeed likely to prosecute Bush officials just to get even it is her.

Moderates and conservatives can only hope that Obama will have tremendous influence over the speaker, and that he will curb her desire for revenge.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Although the goal of campaign financing laws can count on general support, the laws themselves cannot. Especially conservatives complain that these laws are in breach with the first amendment guaranteeing the freedom of speech.

Ironically, liberals supported the campaign finance reforms Obama and his top donors circumvented successfully last year. Liberals argued for years that Big Money had too much influence. They favored laws that would limit the amount an individual could give to one candidate.

Not only did these donors circumvent campaign finance laws, the WaPo adds that Team Obama new about it and actively used these donors to receive more. He turned to these top-donors ‘repeatedly [...] in financing his campaign, transition and inauguration,’ the article says.

Approximately 100 families and individuals are involved. They donated at least $100,000 each to Obama’s campaign and separate committees ‘independently’ working for an Obama victory. ‘The families gave to as many as five committees, records show, and 27 of the 94 families also bundled money from others, collecting millions of dollars on top of their personal donations.’

‘Among the supporters were well-known families such as the Rockefellers, as well as lesser-known backers such as New Yorker Frank Brosens, a leader in the hedge fund industry, who raised $500,000 for Obama’s campaign and inauguration in addition to the $182,000 he gave with his wife, parents and three sons.’

Although there is certainly nothing wrong with donating to a cause one believes in, the records show that campaign financing laws are ineffective. Clever and savvy rich individuals are able to circumvent the law and can give hundreds of thousands of dollars nonetheless; directly and indirectly.

Campaign finance laws have been disastrous. They add little to nothing; yet, they infringe on individuals’ right to the freedom of speech. The article shows that abolishing these laws is the best way forward; that way, the playing field will be leveled once again and it will simplify oversight of campaigns.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Neither Mattson nor her organization have been charged. But prosecutors wrote in July that they had “a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking” the group to Hamas and other radical groups.

There’s a twist, of course.  Mattson and her group have worked with the Bush administration, providing religious training to the FBI.  Wait a second.  Does this mean the Bush administration is responsible for aiding and abetting terrorists?

Despite the sensationalistic headline that I’m only helping to propogate, Haaretz notes that Mattson and her group, The Islamic Society of North America, have not actually charged with anything.  And from what it seems, Mattson been rather known throughout the community in actually denouncing terrorism.  The case is a complicated one:

All this was going on while officials in the law enforcement and intelligence community apparently had evidence that the Islamic Society of North America had ties to terrorists and to the Holy Land Foundation. That foundation and five of its former leaders were convicted at a retrial in November of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas.

Mark Pelavin, director of inter-religious affairs for the Union for Reform Judaism, another organization participating in the prayer service, called Mattson “a really important voice denouncing terrorism.”

“Clearly, Dr. Mattson has been welcome throughout the government,” he said. “I haven’t found anyone anywhere who’s found anything Dr. Mattson has said that’s anything other than clearly denouncing terrorism in quite explicit Islamic terms.”

The government may not even have a case at all:

According to e-mails filed in the court case, one of the prosecutors seemed willing to ask the judge to remove the group from the list.

Or if they do have a case, maybe they just don’t want nasty questions as to why they didn’t better vette the group first before working with them.  Take your pick.

Still, an investigation is just an investigation, so Obama probably doesn’t have much to worry about for Wednesday.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Yet, it’s important that things be kept in perspective.  There is a lot more important things going on out there than the inaguration of a new president.  There are still two wars going on and a global recession affecting the daily lives of millions, if not billions.  While this inaguration will indicate a change (or no change) in how these things are handled, it’s only an inaguration.  In about 37 hours, the new president will have a job to do, and will have to focus on it.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the historical nature of this inaguration.  The fact that it lies near the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and a day after the celebration of the 80th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birth is not lost of me.  Both men were instrumental in bringing about the changes in society that have allowed Obama to be sworn in as the 44th President on Tueday.  I just want people to remember that even on Tuesday there will still be bigger, more immediate fish to fry.  Celebrate the achievement but keep the bigger picture in focus.  That sounds like a good philosophy to me.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

There’s absolutely no good reason for Obama not to close Guantanamo immediately and simply try the detainees in our already-extant courts of law.  That’s how we’ve convicted all sorts of accused terrorists in the past.

Let’s take as assumed all of Greenwald’s key factual premises, add a few points that Greenwald omits, and note what Greenwald, in his ideological extremism, refuses to talk about:First, let’s highlight Greenwald’s factual premises and take them as assumed to be true:

1.  That treatment in violation of Geneva Conventions and certainly in violation of criminal procedure governing interrogations has occured.

2. That the alternative to Guantanemo Bay is trial in standard U.S. courts under standard criminal laws and procedures.

And now let’s add some important and relevant points that Greenwald consistently omits from his posts in spite of their length and purported thoroughness:

1. In addition to rules about treatment during interrogation, standard criminal trials have complex and detailed standards governing chain of evidence and territorial jurisdiction.  Since soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan are not trained or equipped to ensure proper chain of evidence, use of criminal trials would ensure that most detainees would be acquitted even in cases where torture is not an issue.

2. The response to acquittal in a criminal trial is outright release of the defendant.

3. Many of those already released from Guantanemo have returned to the field in the service of al-Qaeda with the explicit intention of killing people in large numbers.

What these points add up to is what Glenn Greenwald apparently doesn’t want to talk about.  Specifically, that his purist approach limiting the U.S. response to global terrorist networks to the use of criminal trials would result in the outright release of many, if not most of the defendants.  Many of those defendants would then dedicate themselves to killing as many Americans as possible, with nuclear or biological weapons, if possible.

Why does Greenwald refuse to discuss the implications of the plan of action that he angrily at at length insists is the only way forward that is even worth of discussion?

Let’s be clear: Torture is a travesty against American values that is wrong regardless of whether it is effective or not and regardless of whether our refusal to use torture is reciprocated when American servicemen are captured.  I am not endorsing torture.  But Obama’s recent moderation of his plan to close Gitmo seems to me a responsible acknowledgment that there are potentially dangerous implications to simply opening the doors and letting Gitmo prisoners to go free because the Bush administration grievously mishandled their interrogation.  Obama’s call for the creation of some alternative process that would balance the deeply conflicting interests that we have in the current situation is laudable.  Greenwald’s demagoguery and extremism is contemptible.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

It works as follows: Iranian agents (or businessmen) contact friends or allies in foreign countries. These friends / allies use a company in their country as a front to buy technology from the U.S. When they receive the products, they send it to their Iranian buddies who then use them in bombs and other weapons.

The above is an admitted simplification of quite a complex scheme:

While illegal trafficking in weapons technology has occurred for decades — most notably in the case of the nuclear smuggling ring operated by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan — the new documents suggest that recent trading is nearly all Internet-based and increasingly sophisticated.

Many of the schemes unknowingly involve U.S. companies that typically have no clue where their products are actually going, the records show.

“The schemes are so elaborate, even the most scrupulous companies can be deceived,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and co-author of a forthcoming study of black markets for weapons components.

Albright said the deceptions can be even more elaborate when the target is nuclear technology. “That’s where the stakes are the highest,” he said. “If Iran is successful, it ends up not with an IED but with a nuclear weapon.”

Rare details about the illicit markets emerge in court records from the Justice Department’s investigation of Iran’s Dubai network, as well as in the ISIS study, which tracks four years of secret trading by Iranian and Pakistani front groups. The study includes copies of invoices and the contents of e-mails from companies looking to buy Western technology.

The good news is that the U.S. knows that Iran is doing this, and mostly how. The bad news is that this does not make it much easier to prevent Iran from purchasing goods it is not allowed to purchase.

It should be rather obvious that a lot of resources and manpower should be allocated to those intelligence officials and departments who deal with this problem. These weapons are used by terrorists in Iraq; American technology is killing American soldiers.

This too will be a major challenge for an Obama administration, albeit perhaps one he does not have a whole lot of direct influence on himself.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

One of the main reasons for the stark assessment is that Obama wants to invest heavily in the U.S. economy during his years in office. The most sober plans anticipate $700 billion in extra investments while many believe the investments will end up in the trillions of dollars. 

Although preparing the American people for major investments and deficits, Obama emphasizes that he plans to spend responsibly. “When the American people spoke last November, they were demanding change — change in policies that helped deliver the worst economic crisis that we’ve see since the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama told reporters at his transition offices. He added, “They were demanding that we restore a sense of responsibility and prudence to how we run our government.”

Many believe government spending to be necessary in the coming years to help the U.S. economy recover. Experts charge that the problems with the economy are structural. This means that the economy will need drastic and structural changes if America wants to be able to compete with Asia in the coming years and decades. “Changes” often cost money.

Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats are nonetheless worried that Obama’s grand plans mean that government spending will run completely out of hand. They argue that the plans will result in an even less healthy spend-receive balance than at present (which is quite terrible). 

Spending may be considered necessary, but unwise spending is just that: unwise. If history is any guide, and it usually is, major deficits will end up weakening the U.S. economy in the long run rather than improving it. The U.S. economy is in trouble today precisely because it was kept artificially high. Pumping more money in the system in order to once again create a bubble and artificial growth will cause tremendous blowback - if one thinks the situation is bad now, one should look at what one’s children will face if Obama’s plans are put into action.

In the end, the only way for the American economy to truly recover is by letting it go down slowly, after which it will rebuild itself in an improved version. The goal should be to create an American economy 2.0, not a remake of 1.0.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

An average adult would not trust Sen. Robert Byrd (who is 91) to pet-sit their mutt for fear that the unfortunate creature might accidentally turn up in chili con carne. Yet, Byrd sits on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, where he doles out massive amounts of taxpayer funds for West Virginia landmarks with "Byrd" in the title.

It’s a question that needs to be asked, particularly in conjunction with the issue of term limits, and it deserves a serious answer rather than boilerplate P.C. nonsense about ageism.  How old is too old? 

It depends.  But there comes a point in time after which wisdom turns to dotage and public service should be ended before the decline begins.  Unfortunately, the current party and power system doesn’t readily allow over-the-hill incumbents like Byrd, Stevens, and Dingell to be replaced without their consent.

Part of wisdom is knowing when to quit.  We see the proof of this all time time in the world of sports.  Michael Jordan knew when to leave the game behind; Evander Holyfield still doesn’t know that he’s been done for 5+ years.  It’s the same way with political heroes too.  The difference is that Supreme Court justices and senators who linger in their fiefdoms do more than tarnish their personal legacies.  Great damage can be done to the country by their refusal to make way for new, more capable leadership.

A mandatory age limit is too general because it disqualifies perfectly fit candidates from holding important positions.  But as Byrd’s tenure demonstrates, a limit of some kind is needed. 

Again and again I return to term limits as a tool to resolve conflicts such as this.  Somehow we need to make them reality.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

One of its main tools in order to strengthen the more moderate wing of the GOP is a forum. PoliGazette and CP may join forces later on with regards to this forum; it has a very real potential to be the forum for the kind of Republicans described above. I encourage you all to head on over to this forum, to read some threads, start some of your own, and to start debating with each other. The debate options at a blog are always fairly limited since you can only talk about whatever the blogger posts. Not so with a forum; there you can take the initiative.

Some threads are already in place for those who love to debate: one about the RNC chair, another one about Bush giving medials to America’s main allies in the war against Iraq, and so on. Go there, start debating.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Several months after the initial bailout, these fears seem to become reality; increasingly more sectors are demanding financial support. U.S. automakers requested it in December 2008, quite irrationally arguing that they too were vital to the U.S. economy. If the would fall, they argued, millions of Americans would lose their job and, therefore, their income. Now, in January 2009, the situation has become even more irrational, even entertaining: the porn industry has joined the ranks of bailout partitioners.

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request $5 billion in aid. “The take here is that everyone and their mother want to be bailed out from the banks to the big three,” said Owen Moogan, spokesman for Larry Flynt. “The porn industry has been hurt by the downturn like everyone else and they are going to ask for the $5 billion. Is it the most serious thing in the world? Is it going to make the lives of Americans better if it happens? It is not for them to determine.”

Francis said in a statement that “the US government should actively support the adult industry’s survival and growth, just as it feels the need to support any other industry cherished by the American people.” He added to CNN: “We should be delivering [the request] by the end of today to our congressmen and [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Paulson asking for this $5 billion dollar bailout.”

Flynt himself also spoke out about the matter. He admitted that the porn industry is not dying, as such; DVD sales are going down, but Internet revenue is going up. Flynt nonetheless believes that his industry could use a bailout, saying: “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex. With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

One wonders whether Flynt et alia are playing a game here, or whether they are serious. If the latter, the answer can be very short: bailout out the porn industry will be deemed immoral by the majority of Americans and it would make no sense economically, since the economic impact of the porn industry is limited. If nothing else, their request proves that the bailout rage is becoming increasingly ridiculous, leading “everyone and their grandmother” to ask the government to bail them out. No government should help all companies, businesses and individuals in trouble: capitalism and free markets mean that some businesses will go broke, they have to, in order to improve the economy as a whole.

Reading Flynt’s remarks, however, gives me the impression that he is, as Hot Air puts it rather well, “using satire to make a political point about the sudden necessity of private enterprise to receive public subsidies.” His goal seems to be to show the U.S. government and the American public that the bailout rage is running out of hand and that who are and who are not bailed out is increasingly decided based on subjectivity. 

If so, his publicity stunt can only be welcomed; it puts the entire bailout rage into perspective and it may even cause proponents of all kinds of bailouts to see that, perhaps, just perhaps, bailout out everyone isn’t the cure for the U.S. economy’s disease.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

If Obama wants to get serious about getting us off foreign oil and eventually off fossil fuels altogether, he could hardly have picked a better candidate.

Dr. Chu left his home at Stanford to direct Lawrence precisely because he was very interested in alternative sources of energy and energy efficiency. He has expertise in his own right on these subjects. He also serves to send the message that the Obama administration wants to take science seriously again.

Dr. Chu will have one major challenge in his position. Though Lawrence is not a small or modest center and I’m sure he is not a total stranger to a limited amount of politics, he is still very much a Washington outsider. He is unfamiliar with Washington power circles and will probably need some very serious and wonkish advisers to guide him through the complex world of Washington politics. However I suspect it takes less time to learn the ropes of those power circles than it takes to learn as much about the relevant scientific concepts and technologies that Dr. Chu is specialized in. He is in a unique position to have the trust of the scientific community, which is notoriously insular and unlikely to trust the knowledge of a non-specialist.

Though as dedicated to the concept of alternative energies as Al Gore is, he differs from the latter in one important respect. Al Gore believes we already have all the technology we need to make the jump to alternative sources of energy and all that’s missing is political will. Dr. Chu agrees that political will is essential (and his position will allow him considerable leverage in that regard) but he believes that a major push in the relevant technologies involved is still necessary if alternative energies are to become profitable and therefore viable.

Below you can see him discussing alternative energies and the less mentioned but extremely important energy efficiencies, as well as the economics involved. 

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Consider the Democratic Governor of Illinois being arrested for trying to sell the senate seat of the President Elect as just one article of many.  Then we have Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid browbeating the accused governor Blagojevich to make an appointment quickly, so that the seat won’t be lost to a Republican in a special election.  Nice work, Mr. Reid!  Why don’t you just admit that the Democratic Party thinks democracy is a mis-nomer.  Maybe Governor Blagojevich can make the appointment from jail, if the legislature doesn’t act first and either remove him form power or impeach him.  Or Harry Reid again, rumored to have been encouraged to intervene to save Al Franken’s failed effort to be elected to a Senate seat in Minnesota. Nice work, Senator Reid - have you considered sending your resume to someone like Robert Mugabe? A place like Zimbabwe, where goon tactics and ballot box stuffing are considered good government is someplace where you would be very much at home.

Or the Kennedy Clan.  Caroline Kennedy is now being promoted as the supposedly logical replacement for Seantor Clinton.  Froma Harrop has a nice response, noting that not only is it a case of establishing a hereditary political seat, but it also shafts a hard-working Democratic female candidate who has years of actual government experience, but not the Kennedy name.

The hubris of the Democratic Party is impressive to watch.  They haven’t even taken office, and they are making some of my liberal colleagues begin to think fondly of a time when we had clean government, and a reasonably effective President.  George H. W. Bush was actually the president one of them said she was thinking kindly of.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

You may have even thought you were watching an episode of Saturday Night Live before reality kicked in and that yes, you had just seen breaking news on TV. And that yes, Bush, at 62, still has catlike reflexes and managed to avoid both shoes. The conference was held in Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki’s office to mark the signing of a security agreement.

Several news reports explained that in Arab culture, throwing shoes is a grave show of disrespect. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” Al Zeidi reportedly yelled at Bush in Arabic. In the Twittersphere, that sentiment may be shared by an even greater number – with thousands of ‘tweets’ expressing their desires to throw their very shoes – and other inanimate objects – at the outgoing 43rd US president.

David Hughes, from Glasgow, Scotland, said simply:

“If I had a shoe, I would throw it at Bush too.”

Rami Ismail, from the Netherlands, said:

“An Iraqi decided to throw a shoe at Bush during a conference. I can only imagine how sad fundamentalists are that the shoe wasn't a grenade.”

Several others commented on Bush’s reflexes and his shrugging the incident off, including Australian Kyle Buttress, who said:

“Bush had some good ducking and weaving action there during the Shoe toss… Good to see he didn't turn his back or anything.”

Erik Rasmussen, in Spain, said:

“This video of Bush & the shoe was the lead story on the news in Spain. Very telling, really, of his “accomplishments”. Needed a bloody nose.”

The Blogosphere is sure to come up with more reactions with each passing hour, but Englishman Georgie Hammerton was one of the quick ones to blog about the incident on My Bloggy Wog.

“I know this isn’t funny.. but, well it is isn’t it?

“On a side note; is this what passes for journalism in the US!? *shudder*. BBC, I salute you!”

Malaysian blogger Shamsul Yunos noted how the media covered the incident.

“If you watch CNN or BBC, they have put a fantastic spin on the story. It goes something like this: ‘Sure the image of someone throwing a shoe at Bush is bad but the fact that the man lived to tell the tale shows just how free Iraq is right now.’

“Great.

“The BBC interviewed people on the ground and the few Iraqis they met agreed with the shoe thrower in wanting Bush and the Americans out of their country.

“Apparently the white house doesn't think the image will seriously damage Bush's legacy.

“So what exactly is his legacy? Leaving a lot of mess behind? I'm sure that legacy is only being reinforced by the shoe throwing incident.”

Yunos was one of the few bloggers I came across that noted that Al Zeidi, the now well known shoe-attacker, had covered events in Sadr City extensively.

“(He) had lost several relatives in the conflict. He was also recently kidnapped and tortured in a three-day ordeal.”

Chicago-based Indian blogger Saqib Salman Shafi in his blog SaqibSaab questioned what Al Zeidi was really trying to accomplish.

“Now, based on the fact that he was using shoes, one may ask what exactly was he trying to accomplish? Best case scenario, Bush gets a black eye or a scoffed up nose. But you know what, I feel the disgruntled journalist, along with millions across the globe, could care less at the effectiveness of his weapons of choice. It was the statement that spoke loudest. Upset with the leader of the super powerful nation of the world? Take off your jutha(shoe) and chuck it at him. I can see the internet jokes of “epic shoe maneuver,” already.

“And check out how quickly he launches the first one and then removes his other shoe (reloads) and fires away. Maybe he had them untied and ready for deployment? Or rather, perhaps he wore slip-ons or loafers that day.”

Egyptian blogger, Zeinobia, was quite sorry Al Zeidi missed Bush’s head.

“This is the news of the day , sorry the news of the week or may be even the month and the end of the year.

“Bush was having a press conference today in his surprise visit to Baghdad with Al Maliki when Muntader Al-Zeidi , a reporter threw his shoes at him. Unfortunately he missed him :(”

She continued to blog about Al Zeidi, being a correspondent for Al Baghdadia Television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt, Zeinobia said she feared for his life.

“He has entered the history, already I wish that someone tells his news now in Baghdad because I fear on his life.

“Idiot Bush of course tried made fun from the incident and said these words : All I can report is a size 10.”

And in the Philippines, someone was up late enough - or way too early - to blog about it almost immediately as it broke. Dreamer4U asked why there was so much hatred in the hearts of Iraqis for Americans and other Westerners.

“It is for sure I thought an embarrassing time for America and Iraq, now I knew how mad is the Iraqi to the American, if you know why let me know here.

“Anyway the shoes of the Iraqi reporter is size 10, Bush should be glad it didn't hit him or else he would be injured before going home in the states. Now I know “W” is good on something, he could have been a good military guy, sadly he was a very ineffective President though.

“Why is it that there are hatred in the heart of the Islam/Iraqi for the American or western people?”

Bush arrived today in Baghdad on a surprise visit — his last to Iraq as commander-in-chief — to celebrate the agreement, thank U.S. troops and meet with Iraqi leaders.

It was Bush’s fourth visit to a nation transformed by the U.S.-led war he started in 2003. It follows three weeks after Iraq’s parliament approved an accord with the U.S. that provides for the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011.