Oh, that's why.

So as anyone could have predicted, the shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist is now a hero across the Middle East:

Newspapers across the Arab world printed front-page photos of Bush ducking the flying shoes, and satellite TV stations repeatedly aired the incident, which was hailed by the president's many critics in the region.

Many are fed up with U.S. policy and still angry over Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam.

As many as 98,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed since the war began, according to Iraq Body Count, an independent organization that tracks media reports as well as official figures. The war has cost nearly $576 billion so far, according to the National Priorities Project.

Wafa Khayat, 48, a doctor in the West Bank town of Nablus, called the attack "a message to Bush and all the U.S. policy makers that they have to stop killing and humiliating people."

In Jordan, a strong U.S. ally, a 42-year-old businessman, Samer Tabalat, praised al-Zeidi as "the man. ... He did what Arab leaders failed to do."

The web has delivered a load of shoe-throwing parodies as well, my favorite being the last one on this HuffPo page, featuring The Three Stooges.

My guess is that the incident will be repeated here in the U.S., possibly in mass fashion, once/if El Presidente gets in front of another crowd again soon. Maybe it'll spread even further, like the comical Yippie pie-throwing at public figures usually carried out by Aron Kay.

In case anyone has forgotten why El Presidente might deserve the shoe-pie treatment, he's still wrong, even admitting so, and not the least bit sorry about it:

May this be his political epigram and epitaph:

"Yeah, that’s right. So what?"

Taste the leather, baby.