The Bush shoe-thrower is jacked now

Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the man who once threw a shoe at George W. Bush during a press conference, posted a gym selfie on X the other day. Cockburn is here to tell you that the man is yoked. “Have a nice day” indeed, Muntadhar!

“This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” al-Zaidi shouted at Bush in 2008, before throwing his shoe. He subsequently spent nine months behind bars. After a release for good behavior, he said he intended to start a foundation that would “build orphanages, a children’s hospital, and medical and orthopedic centers offering free treatment and manned by Iraqi doctors and medical staff.”

That doesn’t appear to have happened. Al-Zaidi also ran, unsuccessfully, for public office in Iraq in 2018. He now works as a writer and broadcast journalist, but appears to be spending a lot of time and effort getting swole, perhaps doing the “Pete and Bobby Challenge.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of al-Zaidi’s “journalism” these days appears to be of the “free Palestine” variety, but he did post a surprising tweet approving of the death sentence for Iryna Zarutska’s killer.

But al-Zaidi has never forgotten his roots. Shortly after his workout pic, he reposted a photo of a T-shirt that reads, “Mentally I Am On The Timeline Where Both Shoes Hit George Bush.” Aren’t we all?

On our radar

IN THE ROUGH President Trump is currently watching Team USA undergo a testing start to the Ryder Cup in Bethpage, New York. They trail Europe 3-1.

COULD THIS HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered hundreds of admirals and generals to attend a short-notice meeting in Virginia next week.

JIM TIME Former FBI director James Comey posted a defiant video on social media after being indicted by a grand jury in Virginia.

Get your ‘Stephen Miller, sexual matador’ poster here

The Trump White House is notorious for producing its share of glorious quotes – but even by its high standards, this was a banner week. On Monday, when the President was alleging a connection between taking acetaminophen during pregnancy and autism, he said, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.” The next day at the United Nations, he dragged the organization for their technical difficulties: “These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.” Then when President Erdoğan of Turkey visited the Oval Office, Trump couldn’t help a joke about the leader of the NATO “democracy”: “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody.”

It takes a lot to top Trump. Step forward Katie Miller, wife of White House aide Stephen and a former aide to Elon Musk herself. Mrs. Miller has a new gig podcasting, and appeared with Jesse Watters on Fox News. If she was after a viral moment to boost her numbers, she bagged it. After Watters said that, being married to Stephen, she was the “envy of all women,” Katie quipped, “the sexual matador, right?”

If you’re not scarred by the mental image of that, don’t worry: Cockburn asked Grok to depict Stephen Miller as a sexual matador (and then told it to “make him sexier” twice):

Now you can print him out and put him on your bedroom wall.

Moscow fools

Top brass at the Telegraph, a British newspaper, are more red-faced than usual this week after issuing an apology for wrongly accusing a State Department official’s wife of having Kremlin ties.

The article in question, by Benedict Smith “erroneously stated that Mr. Sergei Chernikov – and, by association, his niece, Ms. Yulia Kirillova – had current ties to the Kremlin and to President Putin personally. This is false,” the apology reads. “In fact, neither Mr. Chernikov nor Ms. Kirillova has any association with the Kremlin or Mr. Putin. Mr. Chernikov has lived away from Russia since 2008 and has not returned since 2020.”

Kirillova is married to Darren Beattie, a senior State Department official who currently serves as the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Before his role in Foggy Bottom, Beattie was a speechwriter for the first Trump White House and for then-congressman Matt Gaetz – as well as founding the New Right-ish news site Revolver. Presumably that was enough for the British media to try to depict him as a Kremlin stooge. What is the charge? Having a wife, a beautiful Slavic wife?

Cockburn hopes Team Telegraph won’t be Russian to conclusions quite so fast next time…

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