ISTANBUL — When a pair of black leather oxfords hurled at President Bush in Baghdad produced a gasp heard around the world, a Turkish cobbler had a different reaction: They were his shoes.There's your free market for ya!
“We have been producing that specific style, which I personally designed, for 10 years, so I couldn’t have missed it, no way,” said Ramazan Baydan, a shoemaker in Istanbul. “As a shoemaker, you understand.”
Although his assertion has been impossible to verify — cobblers from Lebanon, China and Iraq have also staked claims to what is quickly becoming some of the most famous footwear in the world — orders for Mr. Baydan’s shoes, formerly known as Ducati Model 271 and since renamed “The Bush Shoe,” have poured in from around the world.
A new run of 15,000 pairs, destined for Iraq, went into production on Thursday, he said. A British distributor has asked to become the Baydan Shoe Company’s European sales representative, with a first order of 95,000 pairs, and an American company has placed an order for 18,000 pairs. Four distributors are competing to represent the company in Iraq, where Baydan sold 19,000 pairs of this model for about $40 each last year.
Five thousand posters advertising the shoes, on their way to the Middle East and Turkey, proclaim “Goodbye Bush, Welcome Democracy” in Turkish, English and Arabic.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Selling Even Better Than Bruno Maglis
'Bush Shoe' Gets Firm Footing In the Market
So a backwards, savage culture thinks throwing a shoe is an "insult" and we should... what? Care at all? Why should we accept their cultural "insult" at all?
ReplyDeleteBut here is my question about this. The leftist media have been playing this silly shoe throwing as if we should merely accept these backwards people's "insult" and we should be shamed over it.
So, ONE GUY throwing a show speaks for all the middle east is what the leftist news is telling us.
Yet, when NINETEEN Arabs felled the World Trade Towers we were told by that same leftist media that "not all Muslims hate us."
So, ONE guy can speak for all of Islam, but 19 guys can't?
That leftist, anti-American, Muzzie-loving media sure am cornfusin,' man.
Why should we care? Because we just spent a huge portion of the gross national product and over 4000 American lives as a gift, to liberate that backwards, savage culture. Should we not care how they react to it?
ReplyDeleteAs I said elsewhere, the shoe sales don't prove that "they hate America," though it certainly suggests they hate Bush for what he put them through.