World Leaders Can't Fix Shoes

The young Cambridge man who threw his shoe at Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiaboa said that the shoe was made in China and he had hoped the Prime Minister could fix it. “He was talking about trust and trade and here my Chinese shoe was falling apart. I thought he should put his money where his mouth was and fix my shoe. I’ve given up on these leaders fixing the economies and political conflicts. If you can’t save people’s lives or livelihoods could you at least fix our shoes?”

Ex-President George W. Bush admitted he had no cobbling skills. “My dad was in the Navy and I was Air National Guard. Both of us could stuff a parachute and probably make our beds if we didn’t have servants but we just never really wore down the shoe leather. When the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes my way I thought they must have been directed at Maliki. Maybe he had been a haberdasher or something. I knew I couldn’t help the man’s shoes.”

John McCain took offense at the notion that sailors and fliers couldn’t cobble shoes. “Do you think they gave us new shoes at the Hanoi Hilton? I’m telling you they didn’t. You walked in the shoes that brought you there and it was up to us prisoners to repair and maintain our shoes as best we could. Actually, after the hospitalization I had a pair of hemp slippers or jungle jacks as we called them. You had to reweave them almost daily. That Iraqi and this English fellow should have thrown me their shoes. I’m sure I could have done something with them.”

“My wife, the First Lady, handles all the shoes in our family,” said President Obama. “Now I don’t know if she had some help before though I’m fairly certain that if she needs help now we have an excellent White House Staff- I don’t know if we have a cobbler- but with two growing stylish girls and me just back from a two year campaign trail there have been no shoe incidents in our family to my knowledge. I certainly didn’t need an Adlia Stevenson photo of me with a hole in my shoe. But let me say this, our country is going through some very hard economic times right now and people are going to need their shoes. I don’t know if we can keep a roof over everyone’s head but I will see about doing what we can do in a bipartisan manner to get something around people’s feet. We’re going to have to take on this financial crisis from the ground up and build a solid foundation for economic growth and future prosperity and that all starts with our citizens having some decent shoes. And it isn’t going to be one size fits all. Appropriate footwear to meet the feet of the nation. And as to what I would have done if the shoes were thrown at me I would have thrown them back.”

Don Arrup
Satire1