Anyone Seen the Freeway Blogger, Lately?

...because I think he's reached the level of performance art.

Miami police are looking for a practical joker who delayed traffic this morning on the Palmetto Expressway by dumping thousands of shoes on the tarmac. Oh, no political satire here, folks. That's why neither the AP, the Miami Herald nor the Washington Post bothered to make the obvious political connection.

It increasingly looks as if this is going to be George W. Bush's legacy: Empty shoes with no one to fill them, save for impoverished people in Haiti or whomever will receive them. Which is a perfect metaphor, when you think about it, for the entire Bush administration. Bush came into Washington eight years ago assuming that he could fill Bill Clinton's mighty big shoes and then some.

Instead, Slick Willie's shoes went unfilled because our "war president" was unprepared for war, after all, and even terrorism in general. Because he was unprepared to deal with the current economic China Syndrome, because he was unprepared to deal with a hurricane on the Gulf Coast even during hurricane season and after being briefed and warned by Mr. Mayfield that the levees could be topped or even breached by the National Hurricane Center.

I'm sorry, I'm, sorry, I'm sorry, we're hearing from Shoeless George, but shit happens so whaddya gonna do?

And we have nothing but ourselves to blame for all this, for making the 2000 & 2004 elections close enough so that a theft of either wouldn't look that obvious. We own what's happened since 2001, both figuratively and literally. We just bought $7.8 trillion of corporate debt because we thought that a boob with no credentials whatsoever aside from a few failed years as Governor of Texas and a solid, verifiable background of corporate fraud like the kind we're just starting to pay off now was a better alternative to eight years of peace and prosperity. That he genially led us into the sewers like some hillbilly Charon and ferried us to the underworld of economic and national security Hades.

Unnecessarily making President Obama's job harder.

And Republicans wonder why shoes are getting thrown at him. And people scratch their heads when shoes litter our highways in what is obviously a political statement, a repudiation of the last eight years. Shoes are the new rotten tomatoes and eggs, the new confetti and balloons, the new symbol of presidential failure.