…and the Obama administration’s impotence.
The Birchers were wrong about a lot of things, but not this one. Time to get out. Long past time.
Khadaffi flees LibyaTripoli? I wonder if he had time to grab his female body guards (always seemed such an odd thing in such a misogynistic culture).
Anyway, let’s hope it’s so, though what replaces is always worrisome in a place like that. And my preference would have been incineration in the burning parliament. That would be a more fitting and permanent solution to that particular boil on the ass of humanity.
[Update a few minutes later]
A reminder from Michael Totten of how awful he is.
…of Barack Obama.
As Iowahawk says, it’skind of brutal, but not undeservedly so. And this wouldn’t surprise anyone who has read Stanley Kurtz’s book
How Barack Obama lost the Egyptian people. Fortunately, it’s something that a future president can probably amend.
[Update a few minutes later]
The administration had a year of warning about Egypt.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Update a while later]
Neil Ferguson explains to Mika, Joe and the gang.
Questions have been raised.
You’d think this might have gotten a little more coverage. But it would explain the revival of “duck’n’cover” drills.
Depressing thoughts on the administration and Egypt from Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, and Judith Levy:
All the above said, the actual implementation reflects somebody with the experience of two years in the Senate, who had never navigated outside of academia and Chicago tit-for-tat politics. So Mubarak is/is not a dictator, must leave now/yesterday/sometime soon as he serves as sort of a figurative leader/a critical transition player/a suspicious counter-revolutionary inasmuch as the U.S. must lay down conditions/advise only/respect Egyptian prerogatives, as private conversations with Egyptians are spilled to the press, Obama suggests the Cairo desire for freedom somehow channels his own support, and Biden, Clinton, and Obama contradict one another hourly. This is very sad.
…That smart diplomacy, it turns out, wasn’t ’smart’ as in clever. It was ’smart’ as in how your cheek feels when it’s been slapped hard. The bigger issue here concerns the place of the United States on the world stage. We just sent a message to our friends and allies about how they should value our professions of friendship and our commitments to help them. President Obama has mastered a certain rhetorical schtick. It revolves around the communication of a certain emotion of righteousness. You look out a crowd, eyes raised, and turn your head slowly to the the left, then to the right, then to the left again. It requires a certain arrogance, which Obama certain commands. To work, however, it also requires competence, an understanding of the way the world actually works, which he has once against demonstrated he lacks utterly.
…There are two possibilities, and they’re both appalling. One is that Clapper knew everything he was saying was a gross distortion of reality but said it anyway, thereby deliberately misleading the American people and giving aid and comfort to a group whose interests are completely antithetical to those of the United States. The other is that Clapper is genuinely ignorant of the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, a thought that is just about as unnerving as can be imagined.
If it needs to be to pointed out to the Director of National Intelligence that Google is his friend, we are in a boatload of trouble, folks. I wish I was kidding.
It makes me long for the robust, intelligent foreign policy of Jimmy Carter.
[Update a few minutes later]
“…a sense of powerlessness.”
David Cameron says that government-enforced multi-culturalism in Europe has failed.
Democracy, immigration, multi-culturalism: pick any two.
Thoughts from Bernard Lewis on the problem with the administration’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East:
Is Egypt 2011 like Iran 1979? Lewis: “Yes, there are certain similarities. I hope we don’t repeat the same mistakes.” The Carter administration handled events in Iran “poorly.”
The Obama administration should ponder something, as should we all: “At the moment, the general perception, in much of the Middle East, is that the United States is an unreliable friend and a harmless enemy. I think we want to give the exact opposite impression”: one of being a reliable friend and a dangerous enemy. “That is the way to be perceived.”
Exactly.
People are starting to point out the potential similarities between 1979 Iran and 2011 Egypt. Thoughts from Michael Ledeen, Victor Davis Hanson, and Flopping Aces.
The Shah was no saint, but is Iran and the rest of the world better off, three decades later (or at any time over the past thirty years) for having deposed him and replaced him with a brutal theocracy? This is a situation where one should hope for the best, but fear the worst. And the history of that part of the world doesn’t give great cause for optimism. And the fact that we (incredibly as that may be) seem to have a president even more lacking feck than Jimmy Carter just depresses all the more.
