Bush escapes journo's shoes, gets online hurls

But in the no-man’s land of Internet, the president is ‘shoe-struck’, at least in the form of online games. Within hours of a journalist hurling his shoe at President Bush, game gurus found a great opportunity to make hay while the shoe shines!

And online hoons began remixing the footage into funny animated images and has made at least two online games. And the popularity of the games based on the proverbial ‘shoegate’, as the incident was inevitably labeled, is astounding.

The hyperlinks to games are spreading via the Internet with the speed of light.

In the first game, ‘Flying Babush’, created by mischief-makers in France, players assume the role of Bush and earn points depending on how long they can dodge shoes, which fly at him at a rapidly increasing frequency.

The second game from T- Enterprise, ‘Bush's Boot Camp’, the players take the role of a gun-toting security agent who must shoot the flying shoes before they reach the President.

It has even got a cartoon version wherein Bush is shown dodging the boot from Monty Python, a ball from the cartoon Pokemon, a cat, snowball, cartoon bomb and the deadly shoe from Austin Powers.

"This is going viral at a rapid pace, unlike anything I've seen post-election," David Burch, marketing manager for YouTube tracker TubeMogul, told The Washington Times.

Bush laughed off the incident with a pun, saying: "I don't know what the guy said, but I saw his sole." The journalist is in jail while officials are still confused over charging him for fear of sparking uproar in Baghdad.

Jail or no jail, the ‘shoe’ must go on, isn’t it!?