One of the things I learned in college while taking a course about Latin American revolutions is that desperate people do things that no one else would otherwise do, such as take up arms and storm the halls of power. The other thing that I learned was that journalists have to be objective in reporting the news. So what does a desperate journalist do? He throws a shoe at the President of the United States.

For my money, the You Tube video of the year is the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush who came to Iraq one last time to proclaim that freedom is on the march. Iraq is anything but a success story. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and that country has been decimated after 5+ years of unjustified war. In Iraq, throwing a shoe is a sign of craven disrespect. The angry journalist not only threw one shoe: he threw both shoes. And his throwing arm is outstanding. Had President Bush not ducked, it would have been a direct hit.

Shoe throwing is not a pastime in the United States, probably because once you throw your shoe, you can't get it back, and you need your shoes to walk around in. The best place to throw your shoes is indoors, where the shoe can be retrieved. So far as I can tell, no one has made the connection between the Iraq shoe-thrower and any shoe-throwers in the United States, but there is in fact a real connection.

In 2004, filmmaker Michael Moore tried to derail Bush's re-election campaign with Fahrenheit 911, a provocative movie about Bush's lies and prevarications in Iraq and Afghanistan. The movie was all right, though it could have been updated every week. I am not sure if the movie covered waterboarding and other forms of torture, but it sure made Bush out to be an incompetent dolt. The final scene showed Bush mangling the cliche, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . uh, You can't get fooled agan." Bush couldn't even get his cliches right.

When the media covered the movie as a political event, it noted that moviegoers shouted at the screen. Where I saw the movie, at the Rosendale Theatre in upstate New York, we all walked out of the movie house as if we had just gone to a funeral. We quietly filed out of the building and went to our cars and drove home with somber facial expressions. No one said a word.

But at one movie house, I recall reading, an older moviegoer did as the Iraqi journalist did. After Bush mangled the cliche, he took off his shoe and threw it at the movie screen. And according to Michael Moore himself, "A man in San Francisco took his shoe off and threw it at the screen when Bush appeared at the end. "This was more common than I thought, though, because a Google search references shoe-throwing as an aside, as if it were happening all over the place:

It’s been suggested that F 9/11 is a triumph of form over content-but that’s being generous. In MM’s film, mood and emotion trump both form and content. Its flourishes of detail conspire to build fervour and indignation. It’s an indelicate film-brash, wide-hipped and blustering. Like Moore. That’s why people throw shoes at the screen, weep aloud, can’t lift themselves from their seats when the credits roll. Viewed from whatever side of the fence, F 9/11 denies audiences the luxury of indifference.