Monday, November 26, 2012

President Smiley

In these trying times, Egypt is in need of a man in whom its desperate and divided populace can place its trust, a man who provides a sense of reassurance and integrity, a man who has his priorities straight, a selfless, modest and non-attention hungry man whose very face restores belief in all that is good. While there may have been one or two teeny doubts of his track record, Egypt's revolutionary vanguard has found its new savior: 

Thursday, November 22, 2012

And in other news...

Heaping praises on El Dictator
While President Obama impressed himself with the link he formed with Morsi to cool the political hot potato of Israel and the Palestinians, the "pragmatically confident" Morsi was busy at that very same time usurping near total power on the domestic front in Egypt.  The contrast between U.S. perceptions of a moderate and democratic Egypt and the realities of a theocratic dictatorship in the making could not be sharper, and the rosey perception is most definitely aiding and abetting the culmination of the crude reality.  

What the President of the United States thinks matters.  It matters because the United States is the world's sole superpower, and it has, does and will continue to dominate in the Middle East generally, and in Egypt specifically.  Unfortunately, this president has managed to convince himself early on that Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood can be accommodating partners, whether because he really believes so, or because he lowered the standard so much as to make the concept of partnership nearly irrelevant, or some of both. Whatever the case, Morsi has taken note of the air cover, and the ground offensive is now in full swing.  

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Be Careful What You Wish For

Egypt today can seem a depressing place.  Discourse seems to only revolve around price hikes, fuel shortages, tragic train and road accidents, attacks on innocent girls and scary plans by scary-looking people to take the country back to the stone ages.  Anything and everything is cited as yet another piece of damning proof of the incompetence and danger of the Islamists, feeding into a spiraling cycle of depravity that can only be broken by a full fledged coup d'etat by mystical heroic figures who will intervene to save the day. 

The principal proponents of this desperate outlook are very same "progressive" idealists who initiated the overthrowal of Mubarak's rule, and who now look longingly to an era where traffic was apparently less chaotic, where tragic accidents were apparently less horrific, where the educational system was apparently less awful, where people and religions were apparently less uncivil, where Gaza was apparently less incendiary, and on and on and on.  And apparently forgotten and forgiven are the cynical and stifling politics, cultural atrophy, failed war and foreign policy, stagnant economy and mass corruption emblematic of the military state.