YEAH, THAT MIGHT MAKE YOU A BIT CRANKY

About the shoe-throwing reporter:

"This is a farewell kiss!" the man, identified as Muntadar al-Zaidi, a reporter with the Cairo-based network Al Baghdadia Television, yelled as he threw the shoes. Bush had to duck out of the way, and narrowly missed being hit....

Zaidi, colleagues said, was kidnapped by Shiite militiamen last year and was later released.

And that's true -- here's the Reuters story from last year:

An Iraqi TV journalist who was kidnapped last week in a busy Baghdad neighborhood said he was released unharmed before dawn on Monday.

Muntazer al-Zaidi, a correspondent for the independent al- Baghdadiya television station, said he spent more than two days blindfolded, barely eating and drinking, after armed men forced him into a car as he walked to work on Friday morning in the bustling Bab al-Sharji area of central Baghdad....

Zaidi said the kidnappers had beaten him until he lost consciousness. They used his necktie to blindfold him and bound his hands with his shoelaces....

Kidnapped and beaten unconscious? I can see how that might not make one want to strew roses.

And as was noted at the time of the kidnapping, two reporters from the station had already died violent deaths in Iraq (Saoud Mazahem Al-Hadithi and, a few weeks before Zaidi's kidnapping, Jawad al-Daami).

On the off-chance that you haven't seen it, here's the shoe-throwing clip, via Think Progress:



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UPDATE: Oh yeah, there's this in addition to the kidnapping report mentioned above:

The correspondent for Al Baghdadiya, an independent Iraqi television station, had previously been detained in November 2007 for two weeks by "a particular party" -- his brother didn't reveal whether American or Iraqi –- after videotaping the scene of an improvised explosive device that targeted an American Humvee. He was held again two months later for several hours by the American army without charges, his brother said. Other reports said he had been kidnapped by Shiite militants.

Astonishingly, this doesn't seem like freedom to him.