You’ve seen the video and if you haven’t a friend has sent it. In fact you probably want to give journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, the man who threw two shoes at President George Bush, a few bucks in appreciation.

When I saw the scene on Sunday, a few random thoughts came up:  where were the Secret Service? I can forgive one shoe but al-Zaidi was able to throw two of them before he got tackled. Call me a worry wart but that implies slack security.

President Bush, for all of his faults, is a rather nimble fellow. If it were me, I would have been clocked by one of those projectiles. The president even had his trademark smirk when the second shoe went by him, a look  I’m sure was used back in the day when he was the dodge ball champion of the playground.

The last thought is that for all of the problems with the Iraq War (torture, lousy intelligence, terrible planning, etc., etc.), al-Zaidi would have never thrown shoes at Saddam Hussein and lived to tell the tale. And the Iraqis now calling the journalist a folk hero would have been clamoring for his death.

During the campaign, Barack Obama noted he was against the Iraq War and pointed to a speech he made in 2002 at an anti-war rally.

It’s fair to point out though, he was just a state senator at the time and if he were operating on the national stage, like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards, his position might have been more muted (it was very hard to find any mainstream national pol  willing to go against President George Bush at the time).

However, being against the Iraq War did not make Obama a dove, and he made this clear in that speech.

“I don’t oppose all wars. I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war (emphasis added).”

Some in the liberal/dove wing of the Democratic Party forgot that line and now are scratching their heads as they watch Obama’s national security team take form. Their befuddlement, however, has much more to do with projection than anything else.

“A lot of people took his position on Iraq and projected our politics onto him,” said Maryiln Katz, one of the organizers of the 2002 rally. “And that was never him. It was never true.”

PS: Hope everyone  has a restful and safe Thanksgiving week-end.

The folk who run the op/ed section of the New York Times need a primer in the art of public relations. Two presumptive nominees for the White House, questions and debates on how to manage a war. One nominee, Barack Obama, gets his piece on what to do with Iraq published. John McCain, who has foreign policy chops that Obama lacks, is told his submission on the same topic does not meet the standards of the the Old Gray Lady.

Yes it’s true the newspaper asked Senator McCain for a rewrite and even offered suggestions to add some punch to what the Arizona senator first sent in. Sure the op/ed editor makes clear he wants to have McCain published, but we are talking about a guy who is running to be leader of the free world not a nameless hack who is looking for a clip that will make him a household name (”Mr Withers? Your table is ready sir.”). By not publishing McCain’s essay, the New York Times simply played into the assumption the media is doing all it can to get the junior senator from Illinois elected. A much cleaner response would have been publication based on a couple of changes. By doing that, the New York Times would have saved itself from the bias memo being peddled by Republicans.

Barack Obama meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in Baghdad on Monday.

If there is one issue that arguably helped more than any other to propel Barack Obama to the nomination, it was that of the war in Iraq. Had Hillary Clinton come out against the war instead of voting for it, she would have left no opening for Obama to use the issue of the war to stir the grassroots of the Democratic Party and the netroots of the Internet to mobilize for him and against her. So it is now the junior senator from Illinois, not the junior senator from New York who is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

And while the Iraq war has fallen far behind the economy — which 44% of those surveyed in mid-June by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press rated as the most important issue for them — Pew found that 19% ranked Iraq as the most important issue facing the country, just ahead of energy and gas prices at 17% and ten points ahead of health care at 9%.

But Obama’s trip to Iraq — presenting him with an opportunity to articulate a clear and convincing policy on the war — has already tripped up Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraq’s semi-competent Shia prime minister. “Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki expressed support for Obama’s troop withdrawal plans,” the German magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend, quoting Maliki as saying of Obama’s intention to withdraw the bulk of US troops from Iraq within 16 months, “That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of changes.”

The Spiegel report forced Maliki into wild spin control, the prime minister denying having expressed support for Obama’s plan and claiming that he was misquoted by Spiegel. But Spiegel — the most respected of Germany’s newsmagazines, which makes Time and Newsweek look fluffy in comparison with its Teutonic seriousness — stood by its report and on Monday, Spiegel posted a transcript of the interview with Maliki on its website.

“So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat,” Maliki is quoted by Spiegel as saying in the interview. “But that isn’t the case at all,” he continues. “If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias. The American lead negotiators realize this now, and that’s why I expect to see an agreement taking shape even before the end of President Bush’s term in office. With these negotiations, we will start the whole thing over again, on a clearer, better basis, because the first proposals [from the Bush administration] were unacceptable to us.

The flap over Maliki’s interview with Der Spiegel is bound to embarass John McCain, anxious as the putative Republican nominee is to portray Obama as conceding defeat in Iraq. The Maliki vs. Spiegel affair is also likely to embarrass George W. Bush, who undoubtedly views the Iraqi prime minister as his man in Baghdad — or at least, the closest that he’s going to get to a compliant ally-cum-puppet in the waning days of his second term as president.