The brazen shoe throwing journalist in Iraq is now describing the incident as an “ungly act” and asking Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki for a pardon:

The jailed journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush has asked for a pardon for what he described as “an ugly act,” a spokesman for Iraq’s prime minister said Thursday.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for an Iraqi-owned television station based in Cairo, Egypt, could face two years imprisonment for insulting a foreign leader. He remained in custody Thursday night.

“It is too late to now to regret the big and ugly act that I perpetrated,” al-Zeidi wrote in a letter delivered to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to the prime minister’s spokesman.

The spokesman, Yassin Majid, told The Associated Press that al-Zeidi went on in the letter to recall an interview he conducted with the prime minister in 2005 when al-Maliki invited him into his home, saying: “Come in, it is your home too.”

“So I ask for your pardon,” al-Zeidi wrote, Majid said.

The Iraqi PM can’t give al-Zeidi a pardon for something that has become so public, because it would set a terrible example. What that asshole did was a disgrace and an insult to America. No journalist would ever consider doing such a thing in any other country in the Middle East, because they would be killed. Ironically, it’s the very freedom that president Bush brought and al-Zeidi curses that allowed him to throw his shoes in the first place.

I think the guy is a scumbag and I hope the Iraqi police work him over good before they send him to prison.