The Million Shoe March.

[elfs]

First heard this on Stephanie Miller this morning, and it seems to be going hot: Mail President Bush a shoe. The address for the White House is: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC, 20500.

After all the abuse of office, and the sheer inability of the man to come to grips with the great moral evil he has unleashed on the world, even from a purely secular, even epicurean, even Buddhist viewpoint... he deserves it. He will not go down as our next Truman, loathed upon leaving office only to be rehabilitated by history. He will be the torture president.

In an interview yesterday on ABC with Martha Radditz, Bush made the self-serving statement that "One of the major theaters of war against al-Qaeda was Iraq." Radditz pointed out that al-Qaeda wasn't in Iraq until the U.S. invasion. Bush's response: "Yeah, that's right. So what?"

So what.

So, send him a shoe. You probably don't want to put a return address on it. Think of it as a going away present. Hell, it's not like the country has any money left to pay the mail office workers at the White House anyway.

Comments

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, so what!

Our reason for invading Iraq was valid - to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Just because the al-Qaeda insurgents showed up afterwards doesn't mean that it wasn't a valid battleground. Should we have left the infant government to fend for itself after al-Qaeda set up strongholds?

Why cripple the security screening portion of the White-house mail-room and cost the taxpayers even more money for a stupid, meaningless gesture? What you are suggesting is basically a Denial of Service attack on the white house mailroom.

[erisiansaint]

The reasoning for invading Iraq wasn't to remove Saddam Hussein from power until AFTER we invaded and found no WMDs.

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

No WMD's? How about 550 Metric Tonnes of Yellowcake from Nigeria. Look it up.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/yellowcake.asp):

The removal of yellowcake uranium from Iraq in 2008 proved that Saddam Hussein had been trying to restart Iraq's nuclear program.

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

Snopes failed to mention that Saddam Hussein claimed to have destroyed this yellowcake and refused to let UN Inspectors revisit the site... just one of the reasons cited for the UN passing a resolution declaring Saddam's violation of the 1991 cease-fire agreement.

I lost all faith in Snopes regarding partisan political issues many years ago. Their liberal bias is obvious to people who do their own research. and compare the facts of what they *don't* include in their articles.

[(Anonymous)]

Destroyed 550 metric tons of yellowcake? Sounds easy & cheap. NOT!

Ooops, I am evidently confused.

[(Anonymous)]

Wait, are third-party claims of what Hussein supposedly claimed a good source of facts about him? I didn't even know that Hussein himself was a trustworthy source of facts about his government and its capabilities.

[ben-raccoon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sure it was. Eventually. The first reason was that Saddam had ties to Osama bin Laden. Wait, whoops! Turns out they hated each other. Then they had weapons of mass destruction. Wait, whoops! Only weapons they could find were a couple canisters of mustard gas that expired sometime in the eighties. Bonus! The Bush administration flat out admitted they were lying. Then the reason was that they were actively pursuing a WMD program. Wait.. that one didn't work either. We'll also just ignore the whole lack of a formal declaration of war from Congress, too. It's not like we needed one of those, right?

It's okay to admit that 'your team' screwed up, really. Even the wingnuts are willing to concede that Iraq was a clusterfuck from the word 'go'.

[(Anonymous)]

The reason was that Saddam violated the Cease-fire agreement from the First gulf war, when we agreed to withdraw as long as certain conditions (negotiated by the U.N.) were met.

Our invasion into Iraq was COMPLETELY legal, and according to the terms that Saddam Hussein put his own signature to, personally.

...no matter how many left-wing radicals say otherwise. Repeating a lie ad-nauseum does not make it true, just more disgusting.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

"What" is having a post-invasion plan that accounted for the rearrangement of various power groups that Hussein had been keeping forcibly arranged to his liking. "What" is listening to historians, sociologists and anthropologists familiar with the region much earlier in the campaign than Petreus's assignment. al-Qaeda showing up in Iraq during the chaos was not unpredictable and we could have been prepared if we'd been basing our strategy on reality.

[kengr]

Sorry, but the *current* president's father deliberately chose to *not* invade Iraq to remove Saddam from power.

Why?

Because everyone knew that while he was bad the likely replacements were worse.

Yes, back during the first Gulf war it was being publicly discussed that removing Saddam would result in exactly the sort of mess we have now. The *best* results that could be expected weren't real great either.

That's *why* this Bush had to push the fake links to Al Qaeda and the lies about WMD. Because *just* removing Saddam from power was known to be a *bad* idea.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

No, our stated reason was to prevent Saddam from deploying weapons of mass destruction. The entire course of our behavior as a nation prior to the invasion has been revealed as one dedicated to the course of war, facts be damned, and is atrocious.

Our nation is tarnished, hopefully not irretrievably, by our actions before, during, and now after "the end of major conflict." We re-elected a president who, according to our own Senate, committed war crimes.

The best explanation we have is that we used Iraq as bait. We were so ill-prepared for the post-war cleanup because we hired leaders who said "If you think we're going to spend a billion dollars in Iraq [on reconstruction], you're out of your mind."

You, Darrell, remain a cheerleader for a liar and a torturer, a man so small of soul that he cannot even look at what he did and admit to anything other than his own delusion that he did the right thing.

We can't know what Iraq would be like today if we'd left Saddam in power. The moral objections to Saddam can be said of Mugabe but, funny this, Mugabe hasn't got any oil. Neither has North Korea, another state that fails its people with frightening regularity. We wouldn't have the hundreds of thousands dead; it's quite clear from the celebrations in Iraq and around the Arab world that all the shoe-thrower did was voice what millions believe. We had no business being there. We threw away thousands of our own men and women doing something we had no business doing. We failed to learn from history. We gave Bin Laden exactly what he wanted.

There is no longer any shred of a moral case to be made for what we did to Iraq.

Have a shred of decency and accept that.

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

You, Darrell, remain a cheerleader for a liar and a torturer...

You, Elf, are completely duped by years of lies from the main-stream-media that failed to report accurately and completely on any aspect of the Iraq invasion.

If it wasn't bad news, then it wasn't news.

Bush had an 80% approval rating when we invaded Iraq. He had the support of almost the entire body of congress, with very few exceptions... easy to forget, no?

But all this is non-sequitor to the fact that you are advocating a ridiculous gesture that amounts to a Denial-of-Service attack on the mail room of the White House.

That's just proof that Liberals are not only sore losers... but they are sore winners, too. GOP members may be a bit depressed, but concede that Obama is the President-elect and will try to work with him and keep him from straying too far to the left. When DEMs lose, they whine, protest, and even riot because they don't get their way.

Now that Bush is leaving office, you are upset that he wasn't impeached or tried for war crimes, so you are trying to thrust one last middle-finger at him while he is still in office by sending him a million shoes.

It's pitiful. Really it is.

At least send matching pairs so they can be donated to the Salvation Army or Goodwill to distribute to the needy. Otherwise, you'll be adding to the landfill problem as well.

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

And after people have made their point are the shoes going to be sent to those who really need shoes or just trashed?

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

I would think people wouldn't send a good shoe: a worn-out shoe bound for the trash anyway seems to me like it would be more insulting than a wearable one what with more time rubbing on the ground, and why break up a useable pair? A dilapidated shoe would also be more symbolic of peoples' financial concerns.
I'm probably wrong, unfortunately, and single shoes aren't much good for donating.

[amythis.livejournal.com]

"Shoes for industry! Shoes for the dead!"

How about a compromise

[(Anonymous)]

Wait till he is finally gone and send it to his new home

[arian1.livejournal.com]

I'm sending mine.