2013 in Review -- A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy,* Part 2: Remember when Reagan cut funds for insane asylums?

Storms, guns, bombs, free stuff, and the secret gay life of Obama: Some top Republican lies of 2013

[*TO MEET THE JANITOR OF LUNACY, SEE PART 1]


Plum loco, stone stoopid, or pathologically dishonest? You be the judge.

by Noah

I'm calling this "Some top Republican lies" because everyone else does "Top 10s" or "Top 20s," but I see no reason to come up with some arbitrary round number. Besides, with the Crackpot Party there's always another lie, and chances are very good that the corporate media will be all too willing to repeat them all without examining their veracity. That said, here are a few. I hold these lies to be self-evident.


1. The Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag (government) job

Wingnut Alex Jones (see above), Natural News, New Hampshire Republican State Sen.Stella Trembley, and others had the "scoop" on this one almost immediately after the tragic bombing on April 15th. It's straight out of Marvel Comics or some wacko Twilight Zone. Just like 9/11 truthers, there are a lot of wingnuts out there that are so determined to hate the government for something, anything, especially if that Obama dude is in charge, that their sick minds will concoct and believe anything. For some, the idea of the government taking their guns away or evilly giving you the opportunity to purchase healthcare for your family just isn't enough.


2. A Saudi national or nationals were responsible for the bombing

Shall I speculate as to why it is that, in the twisted minds of Republicans, terrorists must be nonwhite or Muslim? Immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing, the same people were proclaiming that Muslim terrorists from the Middle East were the bombers. That one turned out to be white folks. Oooops! And white folks that were a lot closer to Republicans than Republicans would like to publicly admit, right down to Newt Gingrich, as House speaker, having radical Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth as a liaison to the militia groups of the Northwest. In this case, the bombers were Muslim, but it became obvious that, to Republicans, the glass was only half full.


3. The Saudi government warned the U.S. about the Boston Marathon bombing



Nope. Turns out the Russians did communicate some info about the actual bombers, but a few days after the bombing Glenn Beck said he knew the truth about a Saudi national who had been questioned and let go. It wasn't even the same guys that Rupert Murdoch's New York Post had falsely claimed right on his front page were the perps.

Beck claimed the White House knew who did it and was covering up, and he claimed he would lay out all the evidence the following Monday if the government didn't come clean. There was even some sort of Benghazi connection. So what happened? Well, in the meantime the real bombers were identified and one was killed and one was caught. They weren't Saudis. They even (oh, the disappointment!) weren't of a darkish hue. The whole thing had gotten started on Hannity's show. Bill O'Reilly had Beck on to lay it all out. Thanks, Fox. Where would this country be without you?


4. The White House is full of Muslim Brotherhood

It seems that as soon as Egypt's government fell, and Americans became aware of the Muslim Brotherhood's position of influence and power in that nation, it just somehow sounded perfect to those in the Crackpot Party that there must be some nefarious connection to the Kenyan-born, secret-Muslim, socialist black man in the White House. (Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the Obama administration, even "letting Muslim Brotherhood run anti-terror ops," is just one of the Impeachable Offenses "documented" by crackpot "authors" Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott. If you shopped on the right wingnut website, you could get not just a less-than-half-price copy of the book, autographed, but also a "a FREE Impeach Obama bumper sticker.")

Yes, I can see it all clearly now, the unseen hand of . . . yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Guilt by association when there's no association -- I get it. Next!


5. Bush kept us safe


Giuliani on Hannity again! He did? I coulda sworn that Bush, not Clinton, was at least pretending to be prez on 9/11. It's amazing how anyone can still put Rudy Julieandrews in front of a camera and let him prattle on. It's 2013, for Christ's sake! The man was a failure as a mayor who made himself Mr. 9/11. The guy was so lame, it took him umpteen numbers of trials to nail John Gotti. He spent $50 million running for his party's nomination for president and got one delegate and that delegate was from Florida. But there he was again, in Sean Insanity's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest studio uttering those famous four words, in the wake of the Boston bombing.

One of the sick Republican memes, post-tragedy, was to somehow make the Boston bombing Obama's fault. Hey, Repugs! People were maimed. People died. Families were destroyed! And you, you just see it as an opportunity.


6. Superstorm Sandy was caused by Obama seeding of clouds

Okay, I know this was from late in the previous year, but it still has life in at least some Republican minds. The rest seem to be more fixated on blaming Gov. Blowhard Christie for turning the 2012 election in Obama's favor when he took a romantic walk on the beach with the president. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFvmguc56YA


The first minute and a half is just a Fox News report on the progressing storm. But listen for the eerie voice of insanity that comes in at 1:29 and then shows us "why this Frankenstorm may be changing its trajectory." Can you guess whodunnit? (Hint: "Obama is falling behind in the polls. Is this the October surprise we have been expecting.") The poster, PEREXUSREX, followed up with this reply to doubting commenters: "Watch the news - Obama has been able to look presidential and Mitt Romney has had to slow his campaign. This hurricane has definitely helped Obama who was definitely behind - he is not behind anymore since the hurricane."


7. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi

[Click to enlarge]

Repugs don't even seem to realize that their very own lies about what happened in Libya may have cost Romney the White House when he repeated a portion of their Libya lie in a the second presidential debate and got caught. In Republikook world, President Obama supposedly either let the storming of the embassy happen or encouraged it, maybe with his supersecret Muslim underground decoder ring, or something.

One thing Republicans won't tell you is that it was they who voted in Congress to withdraw security funding for our embassies. Nice goin', a-holes. Since then we've had madman Rep. Darrell Issa, doing his best Joe McCarthy imitation, running hearing after hearing after hearing, wasting mountains of our taxpayer dollars on some insane attempt to build an impeachment-worthy case against the president.  Again, people died, so let's exploit it! Ain't that the Republican way?




8. Romney lost because of "free stuff"


Watch the Lawrence O'Donnell Last Word segment here.

Sooo much chest-beating and recrimination in the wake of Romney losing. So many accusations: Christie, the storm, and, most of all, "free stuff." Obama won by giving out "free stuff" to you know whom.

Just keep telling yourselves that, Repugs. But if Romney had won, people like Sheldon Adelson stood to get a whole lotta free stuff; free stuff in the form of a return of an estimated $700 million in tax breaks in return for his $100 million in campaign contributions. $600 million? Now that's what I call free stuff! Sorry, Mittens, you lost because enough Americans of all backgrounds saw you for what you are.


9. Guns don't kill people

Neither do 30-shot magazines, right? Well, 11 kids escaped death in Newtown, Connecticut, while the shooter in their school had to switch to a new magazine. Suppose he only had 10-shot mags. How much death and human misery would have been avoided?

Yet there are the Republicans, the party that pushes human misery, demanding the right to their 30-shot mags. And if you want to look at the face of insanity --




10. Background checks bad; straw purchases good

Terrorists don't have to try to smuggle their guns into the country. So what's the easiest way for a terrorist to get a gun here in these United States? Well, if you enter a gun emporium and you look like ya just might not be quite white enough and ya might have some sort of one o' them un-'merican accents, they might not sell you a gun. What to do? There's already no background-check thing. That's good for would be evil-doers, but still, there's that accent and skin-tone thing.

Ah, easy! Pay someone to go buy you whatever you need! Street gangs do it all the time. It's called a straw purchase, and Republicans like that just fine. Of course, in the case of the gang gunplay in Chicago, that's all Obama's fault, not the permissiveness of the Republican gun kooks.


11. The Government is buying all the ammo in order to kill us all

No one likes this lie more than the companies that make bullets. It inspires more purchases and hording of ammo. Republicans spend a lot of energy telling each other that Obama is going to take away their guns. They campaigned on it. They shrieked that he'd be coming for our guns as soon as January came along. So it follows that when he couldn't get Congress to pass saner gun laws, he would, naturally, buy up all the bullets!

"We just denied everything that this president and the vice president are trying to do. So what are they going to want to, if they want to violate our Second Amendment rights? Do it with ammo."

-- Sen. Jim Inhofe (Republikook-OK)

Or maybe Iraq, Afghanistan, and the creation of a huge Department of Homeland Security have something to do with the so-called ammo shortage. Look, bozos, if Newtown shooter Adam Lanza can get all those bullets, and all the shooters we hear about every damn day can get all the bullets they need, maybe you ought to rethink this. Please, oh Janitor of Lunacy, make it stop!


12. Obama is still a secret Muslim

Yes. Well, that explains everything. Scientists may still be looking for their Unified Field Theory that explains all the physical workings of the universe, but until then, this works fine for those in the Crackpot Party. Behold, all is explained! I saw it on Fox!


13. Obama is deliberately tanking the stock market in order to destroy capitalism

Hey, let's not let the reality that the market has gone over the 16,000 mark get in the way of this "theory." Wingnut chatterboxes and more reputable authorities like Forbes say a crash is coming. Some say everyone should sell their stocks and cash out. Repug media like Newsmax issue weekly warnings about an imminent crash as if they want it to happen, just so they can blame Obama.

Hey, it might happen. The fall of 2008 wasn't pretty, and not much has been done, and the Wall Street criminals run free, but hmmm, now if everyone were to listen to these Chicken Littles and pull their stocks at once, wouldn't that crash the market and destroy the economy to the likes of which has not been seen since 1929? So just who is trying to deliberately destroy capitalism?


14. Obama is gay and has even been "married" to a man



So says World Net Daily's Jerome Corsi, the Swiftboat guy, so it must be true. Can Issa investigations and Hannity breathlessly speculating about gay orgies in the White House be far behind?

This gay Obama thing refuses to die in Repug circles. It's even used as the reason that there are so many of those wicked LGBTs working in the White House. Maybe the saddest thing is that such a thing would matter to Republicans. Ah, but no wonder Obama is pushing that "gay marriage" thing. Say no more!

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A PRAYER TO THE JANITOR OF LUNACY*

Part 1: Take a bow, Repugs! (*including Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy") [Monday]

Part 2: Remember when Reagan cut funds for insane asylums? (Storms, guns, bombs, free stuff, and the secret gay life of Obma: Some top Republican lies of 2013) [Tuesday]

Part 3: No Cruz control (Rafael "Ted" Cruz in his own words) [Wednesday]

Part 4: A great anniversary approaches! (Nixon's resignation) (plus more "Quote of the Year nominees") [Thursday]

Part 5: Everyone's a critic, including me -- Some people really try my patience (Bill-O, Howie Kurtz, E. W. Jackson, et al.) [Friday]

Part 6 (and last): In the words of Dan Quayle, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" (Exploiting tragedy for a buck; Miss America's not American?; "Quote of the Year" winner) [Saturday]

And don't forget Noah's recent --
"Need a last-minute Christmas gift suggestion?" [12/22]
"50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles" [12/26]
"A Tale of Two Popes -- the one in the Vatican and the one in North Carolina" [12/27]

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Egyptian Update... From Bad To Worse

From the very first, the coup leaders prioritized the systematic intimidation-- not to mention murder-- of members of the independent media. Independent reporting is the last thing the Egyptian security state and their American backers wanted. As we pointed out before, they had their story down and that is the only story they want out there. Even though their story is patently absurd. And killing members of the media isn't where it ends. Now they're even hauling Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading neo-liberal and until last week the "vice president" of the junta's puppet regime and the best known face of the coup to the outside world, in front of a court. He faces trial on the charge of "betrayal of trust" and could get 3 years in prison. The junta is furious because they think his high profile resignation "gave the wrong impression to the international community" that they were using excessive force against the protesters. If they're putting a figure like ElBaradei on trial, this thing has spiraled out of control and is heading into an even worse confrontation.

Without the independent media that the coup leaders have tried to silence, we wouldn't know anything about what's really happening in Egypt except for the propaganda from both sides and the spin from untrustworthy U.S. corporate media. The best summation right now is available in a story from Wednesday's Guardian. It's not very optimistic.

The police lieutenant put his boots up on the desk and casually reloaded his machine gun. "The problem is," he said, nodding at a television that was live-broadcasting the siege of a nearby mosque, "these people are terrorists."

It was mid-afternoon last Saturday, and for nearly 24 hours, the lieutenant's colleagues in the police and army had surrounded the al-Fath mosque in central Cairo, inside which were hiding a few hundred supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi. On screen, it seemed like it was the soldiers doing the terrorising. But for the lieutenant, the terrorists were the ones on the inside. They had bombs, the policeman said: they deserved what they got. And a mob of locals agreed. "The police and the people," chanted a crowd that had gathered to lynch the fugitives as they exited the mosque, "are one hand."

It was a wretched scene-- but one that has become familiar in Egypt. Here was yet another symptom of the widespread hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, which in the space of a year has gone from being Egypt's most powerful and most popular political group – to fugitives. Here, also, was brutal violence. A shortage of humanity. And above all: scant regard for the truth.

For those inside the mosque were not terrorists. An armed man may have later been filmed on top of the minaret, but the mosque's imam claimed access to it was controlled by security forces who had by that point breached parts of the building. For certain, when I visited the mosque the day before-- shortly before troops surrounded it-- it mainly housed doctors and corpses. After the police fired on nearby Morsi supporters-- who had gathered to oppose not just the 3 July overthrow of the group's scion, Mohamed Morsi, but also the massacre of hundreds of Morsi backers last Wednesday-- the mosque had been turned into a makeshift field hospital to deal with the fallout of Egypt's fourth mass killing in six weeks. "After they finish outside, [the police] will come in here," a doctor, Mahmoud el-Hout, said, "and arrest all the wounded." He wasn't far wrong, with only women and the dead later granted a safe exit.

Inside and outside the mosque, then, two parallel realities existed-- much as they do across Egypt as a whole. The country is largely polarised between, on the one hand, those who believe their livelihoods and way of life were threatened under Morsi's incompetent and divisive presidency, and that his Muslim Brotherhood are violent traitors who must be destroyed-- and, on the other, the Brotherhood and its dwindling Islamist allies, who remained camped in Cairo's streets after Morsi's ousting to defend his democratic legitimacy.

The split is not even. Millions marched on 30 June to call for Morsi's departure, and the vast majority of the country is firmly behind the army who deposed him days later. But perhaps less than 25% of Egyptians now have strong Islamist leanings, if Morsi's quarter of the vote in the first round of last year's presidential elections is anything to go by.

Here and there, activists prominent from the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak reject this binary division and express disgust at both the new fascistic army-backed regime and the authoritarianism of Morsi's own government. Army rule may be counter-revolutionary, they argue, accompanied as it is by a return to favour of figures, institutions and policies that buttressed the Mubarak era. But so too was Morsi, who tried to co-opt corrupt state institutions, rather than reform them-- and who had little interest in building consensus, reigning in police brutality, or increasing social freedoms beyond those of his once-oppressed Islamist allies.

Yet few share this nuance. Most so-called liberals have thrown their lot in with the army, since the current environment has forced almost everyone into a with-or-against-us mindset. When Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading liberal politician, resigned as interim vice-president in protest at last Wednesday's massacre of Islamists, he was roundly attacked-- even by former allies. Sayed Bedawy, leader of Egypt's oldest liberal party, told a breakfast show that he didn't want to call ElBaradei a traitor-- before strongly implying that he was. "Mohamed ElBaradei is a son of a bitch," summarised one woman in the mob outside the al-Fath mosque on Saturday.

Haranguing western media's lack of support for the army's crackdown, an otherwise measured psychologist recently told me that he felt Muslim Brotherhood members-- many of whom have obediently remained in the streets on the say-so of their leaders-- were suffering from some sort of collective psychosis. Yet if the Brothers are delusional, then it seems only fair to apply the same rhetoric to their opponents, who seem to be under an equally debilitating spell.

Spurred on by a jingoistic and uninquiring media (some Egyptian television presenters cried with joy on air the day Morsi was overthrown) much of Egyptian society is convinced that the former president's supporters are wholly a terrorist force bent on making Egypt part of some wider Islamic state. "We are not against any protesters-- but we are against terrorists. We have a war with terrorists," says Mohamed Khamis, a spokesman for Tamarod, the grassroots campaign that successfully encouraged millions to march against Morsi in June.

Khamis said he accompanied the police last Wednesday, when security forces murdered hundreds at two six-week-old pro-Morsi campsites. "We asked the police officers to shoot them with pistols and the police officers refused to shoot them," Khamis counter-claimed. "Really, that was what happened. So I am surprised people died. How come so many people died then? I think it was the Brotherhood who killed them-- not the army or police."

But while the Brotherhood is no stranger to violence-- not least during clashes last December outside the presidential palace when Brotherhood members attacked anti-Morsi protesters-- their recent involvement in acts of aggression, to be fair, remains unproved. Certainly, jihadi insurgents outside the Brotherhood's command-- but nevertheless angered by Morsi's removal-- have mounted a terrorist campaign in the lawless Sinai peninsula during the past six weeks. Twenty-five police conscripts were murdered in cold blood by Sinai insurgents on Monday. Undeniably, Morsi sympathisers of some form have attacked dozens of police stations since Wednesday's massacre-- and desecrated at least 30 Christian churches, following prolonged sectarian incitement from some Morsi supporters at Brotherhood-led sit-ins over the past month. And if the crackdown against the Brotherhood and its allies continues, it is hard to see how more extremist violence can be avoided.

But the central charges-- that most Brotherhood supporters are violent, that their two huge protest camps were simply overgrown terrorist cells, and that their brutal suppression was justified and even restrained-- are not supported by facts. My experience during six weeks of reporting at Rabaa al-Adawiya in Cairo suggested the vast majority of protesters there-- including many women and children-- were peaceful. Many may have failed to face up to Morsi's own incompetence and autocratic governance, and some may have turned too blind an eye to sectarian attacks recently completed in their name. Others have actively incited them. On the day of the coup, an imam from Minya, in southern (or "Upper") Egypt, ominously said backstage at Rabaa: "It's going to be a civil war-- and it's going to be very bad in particular for the church in Upper Egypt, because everyone knows they have spearheaded this campaign against the Islamic project." Anti-Morsi sentiment stems from both Muslims and Christians, but some members of the Brotherhood have disgracefully scapegoated and attacked the latter.

But many Rabaa protesters have simple, sincere reasons for their anger: they are upset at the theft of their votes, and fearful of a return to the anti-Islamist oppression of the Mubarak era. "We all voted for democracy," housewife Aza Galal told me last week, six-year-old son Saif in tow. "And then, because some people gathered in Tahrir Square [on 30 June], they put our votes in the rubbish bins." Morsi's government hardly promoted the wider democratic values on which a successful democracy relies-- but Galal's anger is understandable: Morsi or his allies won five consecutive votes between 2011 and 2012.

"If we leave the square, it will be worse than the 90s," added Suzanne Abdel Qadir, referring to Mubarak's treatment of Islamists. "We're back to the days of oppression under Mubarak. If we go home, then the fight is over."

The pro-regime propaganda comes right from the top. On Sunday, Egypt's state information service published a public memorandum to foreign correspondents in Egypt, rebuking western media for failing to acknowledge that the 3 July coup reflected the will of the people, and for being overly sympathetic to the Brotherhood-- apparently unable to distinguish between support for Morsi's disastrous and autocratic presidency, and criticism for the flagrant human rights abuses of his successors. Among many other false claims, it justified the siege of two mosques used by pro-Morsi doctors last week to house, respectively, a makeshift morgue and a field hospital-- on the grounds that they had, in fact, harboured terrorists.

As one journalist noted, such claims would have been amusing had they not further endangered the lives of foreign journalists in Egypt (several of whom have been either assaulted, detained, or even killed last week while trying to cover Egyptian news)-- and had they not flown in the face of the truth. At the Iman mosque, where hundreds of dead bodies were taken from the site of one of the massacres on Thursday, there were no insurgents-- just corpses. Filling the floor of the mosque in its entirety, many of them had already begun to rot, and one was so badly burnt that it looked less like a body and more like a blackened tree stump. Doctors said it was the remains of a boy in his early teens-- and an old woman squatted beside it in the belief it was her lost relative. But only its sunken eye-sockets and internal organs identified the corpse as that of a human.

The next day, at the al-Fath mosque, there were again no obvious terrorists, but simply unarmed and injured protesters, many of whom were bleeding to death. One man, Mohamed Said, was carried in, barely conscious-- a gunshot wound to his back-- and leant against a pillar. Then his head slumped, and doctors rolled his eyelids shut.

Egypt has been awash with cruelty-- from the desecration of Christian churches by Islamists, to the burning of corpses at Rabaa. But perhaps the most heartbreaking sight has been the street outside the Zeinhom morgue, Cairo's main mortuary. Due to the massacres, morgue staff, already severely stretched, struggle to deal with the unprecedented number of bodies arriving for autopsies. As a result, dozens of grieving families have clogged the street outside, their dead relatives rotting in the heat. A curfew is in place in Cairo, but families dare not leave the queue until their relatives are admitted to the morgue-- decomposing though they may be. "Curse the curfew," said Atef Fatih, whose brother was shot dead last week. "We don't care about it. We will wait until they let the body inside."

Some pile the coffins high with slabs of ice to stop the rot. But the ice melts fast, leaving the ground a sludgy mess of mud, blood and corpses. To add to the injustice, many families report that the police have refused to sign off their corpses as murder. Humanity and truth are in short supply.

And nor are they the only virtues to have been sacrificed in Egypt. So too have logic and common sense. Amid the rhetoric about Islamic terrorism, few seem to recognise that most of the terrorising has in fact come from the state. The government justifies the state-sponsored violence as a necessary step towards avoiding civil war. But it does not seem to realise that its provocative brutality is the thing that makes such a horrific outcome more likely-- further alienating and radicalising Islamists, and pushing some towards violence. (One commentator suggests that this may, in fact, be the state's desired outcome-- a heightening of extremist violence, which gives the government more cover to increase their powers.) Similarly, few seem to have seen the irony in appointing a new cabinet whose primary objective is to fix Egypt's economy, but which has since given its full backing to the state massacres that have further frightened away the very investors on which a revived economy would depend.

With the state seemingly unwilling to reign in its violence, the Brotherhood unlikely to curtail its street presence, and unwilling or unable to prevent its allies and harder-line followers from violence, the future looks utterly bleak. Here and there, there are moments of fleeting dark humour. Egypt's leading private broadsheet, al-Masry al-Youm, published last week an interview with a Republican "senator", one Maurice Bonamigo, a man very approving of Egypt's controversial new domestic direction-- but one who also sadly later emerged to have never been elected to higher office.

There have also been moments of unexpected personal kindness. They range from the soldier photographed aiding a grieving woman during last Wednesday's massacres to the police lieutenant who, putting his machine gun to one side and switching off his television, handed me a carton of guava juice-- bringing to an end a two-hour-long detention at the hands of both police officers and an angry mob of vigilantes. "You are welcome in Egypt," the lieutenant said, and smiled.

I suppose if he mentioned the fact that the Egyptian military has a sordid history of burning down Coptic churches to blame it's enemies and curry favor in the West, he wouldn't be as welcome next time. Meanwhile, Obama seems pretty freaked out by how rapidly the whole project has-- as these things tend to-- careened out of control. The New Yorker's John Cassidy asserts that there is, after all, a limit to Obama's pragmatism. "In the 2008 campaign," he reminds us, "Obama talked about reshaping the international architecture, defending democratic values, and ridding the world of things like climate change and nuclear weapons. On receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2009, he spoke of 'bending history in the direction of justice.'" In reality, though, he's been less transformational and more of a pragmatic transactionalist.

Nowhere has Obama’s caution been more evident than in the Middle East, where his rhetorical embrace of the Arab Spring, combined with a reluctance to get involved in messy situations, has outraged interventionists on the left and the right. In Syria, the Administration had, until recently, more or less stood by as the Assad régime killed many thousands of people in a brutal effort to put down an insurrection. Even the recent decision to provide small arms to the rebels was a modest move: few analysts think that it will be sufficient to alter the course of the civil war. Now the focus is Egypt, where a violent crackdown continues in the wake of a coup. According to reports over the weekend, the military-backed government is now considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and banning it completely.

Obama’s refusal to truly break with the Egyptian generals who now control the country, and, in particular, his decision not to suspend U.S. military aid, is being criticized on both sides of the political divide. Last week, after security forces broke up a Muslim Brotherhood-led sit-in protesting the coup, at the cost of more than six hundred lives, the Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who travelled to Cairo two weeks ago in a vain attempt to persuade the authorities to refrain from violence, said that the military-installed government was “taking Egypt down a dark path, one that the United States cannot and should not travel with them.” Senator Rand Paul tweeted, “President Obama says he ‘deplores violence in Egypt,’ but U.S. foreign aid continues to help pay for it.” Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic Senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, joined the calls for a cutoff in aid, saying that the Egyptian government had used the unpopularity of Mohamed Morsi’s administration as a license to restore the old military régime.

Obama's response has been criticized as too tepid, but Cassidy insists his pragmatic approach has been "the self-interested approach that the United States had adopted throughout the Middle East for decades until George W. Bush blundered into Iraq." That pragmatic approach tolerates-- to put it mildly-- "autocratic and repressive régimes that agree to promote Western interests... [I]t is Egypt’s official recognition of Israel, and its maintenance of peace with its eastern neighbor, that explains why, for years, it was the second largest recipient of U.S. aid. (Following the misadventures of the past decade, it has fallen to fifth place, behind Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, and Pakistan.) And it is Egypt’s supportive role in the 'War on Terror' that explains why so many figures in the U.S. defense establishment continue to have warm feelings towards the country’s security forces."

The real test of a pragmatic President is whether his policies hold up over time. Looking back on the first Iraq war and comparing it to the still unfolding disaster that followed the second one, most people would agree that George H. W. Bush and Scowcroft made the right decision in leaving Saddam in power and adopting a policy of containment.

In Syria and Egypt, it is too early to reach a definitive judgement on Obama’s policies... If [Sisi and the junta] make the state of emergency permanent, ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and restore the Mubarak era, Obama’s reluctance will look worse than craven. Even then, though, some realists would argue that as long as the Egyptian government sticks with the Camp David accord and opposes Islamic fundamentalism, it is in the interests of the United States to support it.

I don’t think that Obama would go that far. His hope appears to be that once the current crackdown ends, the government will abandon the state of emergency, free most of the people it has rounded up, and set in train a process for rewriting the constitution (one that was endorsed in a referendum, mind you), engaging some of the religious parties, and holding parliamentary and presidential elections. At this stage, it looks like a rather forlorn hope.

And then there's the whole "innocence" of Hosni Mubarak thing.

Egypt's former autocrat Hosni Mubarak was flown from jail on Thursday in a symbolic victory for an army-dominated old order that has overthrown and imprisoned his freely elected Islamist successor.

A blue-and-white helicopter took Mubarak from Cairo's Tora prison, where scores of his supporters had gathered to hail his release. He was flown to a military hospital in the nearby southern suburb of Maadi, officials said.

"He protected the country," said Lobna Mohamed, a housewife in the crowd of Mubarak well-wishers. "He is a good man, but we want (Abdel Fattah) Sisi now," she said, referring to the army commander who overthrew Islamist Mohamed Mursi on July 3.

Is Obama Lying When He Says The U.S. Wasn't Complicit In The Egyptian Coup?

Obama won't even acknowledge the military takeover from a legitimately-elected government in Egypt was a coup. And he claims the U.S. had nothing to do with it. U.S. allies and puppets in the region-- other than Israel-- aren't hiding their participation though. From a report by the right-wing Israeli military intelligence website, DEBKAfile:

The lightening coup which Wednesday, July 3, overthrew President Mohamed Morsi put in reverse gear for the first time the Obama administration’s policy of sponsoring the Muslim Brotherhood movement as a moderate force for Arab rule and partner in its Middle East policies. DEBKAfile reveals that the Egyptian military could not have managed their clockwork coup without the aid of Saudi and Dubai intelligence and funding.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE threw their weight and purses behind Egypt’s generals aiming to put their first big spoke in the US-sponsored Arab Revolt (or Spring), after they failed to hold the tide back in Libya, Egypt and thus far Syria.

...The coup leader, Defense Minister and army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, had two more Saudi-Gulf commitments in his pocket, say DEBKAfile's Middle East sources:

1. Should the Obama administration cut off the annual US aid allocation of $1.3 billion, Saudi Arabia and the UAE would make up the military budget’s shortfall;

2. The Saudis, UAE and other Gulf nations, such as Bahrain and Kuwait, would immediately start pumping out substantial funds to keep the Egyptian economy running. The Egyptian masses would be shown that in a properly managed economy, they could be guaranteed a minimal standard of living and need not go hungry as many did under Muslim Brotherhood rule.

According to our sources, the Saudis and the UAE pledged to match the funds Qatar transferred to the Muslim Brotherhood’s coffers in Cairo in the past year, amounting to the vast sum of $13 billion.

This explains President Barack Obama’s caution Thursday morning, July 4, in his expression of deep concern over the ousting of the Egyptian president and the suspension of its constitution. He urged the military to restore government to civilian hands-- without accusing them outright of a coup d’etat-- and to “avoid arresting President Mosi and his supporters.”

...The removal of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt has far-reaching ramifications for Israel. In the immediate term, it gives Israel some security relief-- especially, easing the dangers posed from Sinai to its southern regions. The radical Palestinian Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot which rules the Gaza Strip, has suffered the most damaging political and military setback in its history with the loss of its parent and patron in Cairo.

DEBKA is a mouthpiece for the Israeli intelligence community and its not always easy to read between the lines and understand what they're pushing and what they're hiding. Over the weekend, though, David Kirkpatrick at the NY Times filed a report from Cairo that made it crystal clear that Obama's claims that the U.S. wasn't involved with the coup or putsch or whatever he wants to call it are blatantly false. When an Arab foreign minister called Morsi with a final offer before the tanks rolled out of their barracks, Morsi sent his response-- a rejection of the terms-- to Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador and Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser. The State Department told the Times it would have no comment on the report.

Some people couldn't help recalling how the British and American intelligence services orchestrated-- and paid for-- populist street protests in Tehran in 1953 when they wanted to justify a coup to overthrow the popular government led by the very independent-minded Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh. The CIA paid Iranian Organized Crime to set the coup right when it foundered on the first day causing the weak American client, the Shah, to flee the country. Take a look at Bill Moyers' report for PBS in 1987 about what happened in Iran... and how it turned out:



Now, back to Kirkpatrick's report in the Times:

The abrupt end of Egypt’s first Islamist government was the culmination of months of escalating tensions and ultimately futile American efforts to broker a solution that would keep Mr. Morsi in his elected office, at least in name, if not in power.

A new alliance of youthful activists and Mubarak-era elites was driving street protests. A collapsing economy put new pressure on Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, the once-outlawed Islamist group that had finally come to power after the ouster of the former president, Hosni Mubarak. And an alliance between Mr. Morsi and the nation’s top generals was gradually unraveling.

Senior Brotherhood officials said Mr. Morsi’s adamant response to the last proposal-- a combination of idealism and stubbornness-- epitomized his rule. It may also have doomed his presidency.

As long ago as the fall, he had spoken fatalistically of the possibility of his own ouster, his senior advisers said. “Do you think this is the peak?” he asked a visibly anxious aide during his first major political crisis. “No,” Mr. Morsi said with resignation, “The peak will be when you see my blood flowing on the floor.”

That was just after what his advisers and Muslim Brotherhood leaders now acknowledge was the defining blunder of his one-year presidency. After Mubarak-appointed judges dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament, Mr. Morsi in November declared his own authority above the courts until a constitutional convention could finish its work.

...Through it all, Mr. Morsi never believed the generals would turn on him as long as he respected their autonomy and privileges, his advisers said. He had been the Muslim Brotherhood’s designated envoy for talks with the ruling military council after the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. His counterpart on the council was Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi.

The Brotherhood was naturally suspicious of the military, its historical opponent, but General Sisi cultivated Mr. Morsi and other leaders, one of them said, including going out of his way to show that he was a pious Muslim. “That is how the relationship between the two of them started,” said a senior Brotherhood official close to Mr. Morsi. “He trusted him.”

The two grew so close that Mr. Morsi caught his advisers by surprise when he promoted General Sisi to defense minister last summer as part of a deal that persuaded the military for the first time to let the elected president take full control of his government. Mr. Morsi kept relations with the military as his “personal file,” and worked out the deal without consulting his aides, one adviser said.

...Morsi insisted to his aides that he remained fully confident that General Sisi would not interfere, almost until the end of his presidency. He was the last one in the inner circle to acknowledge last week that General Sisi was ousting them.

United States officials had repeatedly urged Mr. Morsi to compromise with the opposition and include it in government. In December, President Obama met with Mr. Haddad, Mr. Morsi’s foreign policy adviser, in the Oval Office to deliver that message, Mr. Morsi’s advisers said. At one point, they said, Mr. Obama offered to intervene with the opposition leaders, either Mohamed ElBaradei, the former United Nations diplomat, or Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister under Mr. Mubarak. But Mr. Morsi declined.

Embassy officials tried to act as intermediaries, Morsi advisers said. They said Secretary of State John Kerry suggested naming Mr. ElBaradei as prime minister. But this year, Ms. Patterson pointedly told Mr. Morsi’s aides that some in Washington were running out of patience with her defense of Egypt’s new Islamist leaders, his advisers said.

By June, the economy was sputtering, with gas shortages and blackouts. Young organizers tapped into the growing discontent with a petition drive calling for Mr. Morsi’s removal, and it was set to culminate in a demonstration on the anniversary of his inauguration, June 30.

The first alarms went off in Mr. Morsi’s inner circle on June 21, when General Sisi issued a public statement warning that the growing “split in society” between Mr. Morsi’s supporters and opponents compelled the military “to intervene.”

Mr. Morsi was given no warning, his advisers said. But when Mr. Morsi called the general, General Sisi told the president that “it was to satisfy some of his men” and that “it was nothing more than an attempt to absorb their anger,” one of Mr. Morsi’s advisers said. “So even after that first statement, the president didn’t think a coup was imminent.”

The day before the protests, General Sisi called Mr. Morsi to press him for a package of concessions, including a new cabinet. But Mr. Morsi refused, saying he needed to consult first with his Islamist coalition.

When the protests came last Sunday, demonstrators were energized by the general’s suggestions of a possible intervention. Millions poured into the streets.

Inside Mr. Morsi’s office. Mr. Morsi’s team checked the official crowd count, sent its own observers, monitored the gathering on Google Earth, and even compared the numbers of mobile phone signals in various public squares, one adviser said, and mistakenly concluded that the pro-Morsi rally in Cairo outnumbered the protests against him.

“We felt a sense of relief,” the adviser said.

The next day, on Monday, General Sisi gave political leaders a 48-hour ultimatum to reach a compromise. A shaken Morsi adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said at the time the president’s team considered it “a military coup.”

Mr. Morsi’s advisers had meetings with Ms. Patterson and her deputy as well as a phone call with Ms. Rice, the national security adviser. Mr. Morsi’s advisers argued that ousting the president would be “a long term disaster” for Egypt and the Arab world because people would “lose faith in democracy.” They said it would set off an explosion in the streets that they could not control.

And they argued that the United States was implicated: “Nobody who knows Egypt is going to believe a coup could go forward without a green light from the Americans.”

At a meeting with General Sisi at 2 p.m. the next day, Mr. Morsi’s advisers said that they had their coalition’s blessing to accept the earlier concessions the general had suggested before the protest.

But when the general returned to the Republican Guard building at 6 p.m., he said “the opposition” had balked, the advisers said.

Mr. Morsi’s team did not know who the general actually consulted and the young protest leaders and some other opposition leaders said they did not know either. But that night Mr. Morsi delivered a fiery address denouncing his opponents as traitorous conspirators.

General Sisi later publicly cited the speech as a turning point in his decision to act.

On Wednesday, the generals convened a four-hour meeting at military headquarters with protest and opposition party leaders. The head of Mr. Morsi’s Islamist party, now jailed, was invited but did not attend.

In Washington, officials stepped back and said little.

This is going to be a real disaster in the long run, probably as bad as the one the CIA triggered in Iran in 1953. I'll go to my grave glad I didn't vote for Obama in 2012. Congress is already splitting between those who want to keep giving away billions of taxpayers dollars to Egypt's military and those who want to obey the law and cut off the aid. And everyday, this is looking more and more like a civil war could break out.

"Mistakes were made," says Egyptian President Morsi -- but at the moment his regime appears to be having its own way

Policed used tear gas on these demonstrators in central Cairo on November 23, after President Morsi's announcement of his self-declared new special powers.


"There have been mistakes here and there, and I bear responsibility."

-- Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, in a speech Wednesday

"Critics have always made this point -- that the worst thing that could happen to the Brotherhood might be a rise to power, because then their weaknesses would be exposed. But this is small consolation in Cairo. The world is full of bad regimes that survive just because they hurt others more than they hurt themselves."

-- Peter Hessler, in a December 24 New Yorker
"Comment" piece, "Brothers' Keepers"

by Ken

Say, did you hear about Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi owning up to "mistakes here and there" -- for which he even said he bears responsibility! -- in the process of drafting and ratifying the new constitution he worked so hard to ram through the electorate?

On Wednesday, welcoming the bitterly contested election result with an unfamiliar attitude of humility, the Muslim Brotherhood's man at the top in Cairo "took responsibility for 'mistakes' during the run-up to ratification of the new Constitution and urged Egyptians to appreciate the fierce disagreements about it as a 'healthy phenomenon' of their new democracy,' " according to the NYT's David D. Kirkpatrick.

Appealing for unity after the bitter debate over the charter, which was finalized by his Islamist allies over the objections of opposition parties and the Coptic Christian Church, Mr. Morsi pledged in a televised address to respect the one-third of voters who cast ballots against it. "This is their right, because Egypt of the revolution -- Egypt's people and its elected president -- can never feel annoyed by the active patriotic opposition," he said, bobbing his head between the camera and the lectern as he read from a prepared text. "We don't want to go back to the era of the one opinion and fabricated fake majorities."

But Mr. Morsi offered no concrete concessions, and he did not acknowledge any specific errors, saying only, "There have been mistakes here and there, and I bear responsibility." His most tangible outreach to the opposition was an invitation to join a so-called national dialogue that has already begun under his auspices. Hussein Abdel Ghani, a spokesman for the main opposition bloc, dismissed it as "a dialogue with himself" based on "political bribes."

Oh, so mistakes were made, eh?

Reporter Kirkpatrick acknowledges that this wasn't exactly the most forthcoming of ownings-up. Still, he writes, "Mr. Morsi's attempt at reconciliation, however vague or superficial, represented another notable step in Egypt’s political transition."

Here was a recently elected politician seeking to move from the brutally partisan campaign back to the political middle. The speech echoed many American inaugural addresses.

It was a stark contrast to Mr. Morsi's previous speech, given just 20 days ago, when he sounded far more like his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. Then, Mr. Morsi attributed a night of deadly violence between his Islamist supporters and their opponents to a conspiracy of foreign agents, old-regime insiders and his political rivals.

"As we all welcome difference in opinion, we all reject violence and breaking the law," Mr. Morsi said Wednesday, without blaming either side this time.

In Egypt, where previous presidents more often jailed political opponents, even Mr. Morsi’s limited mea culpa appeared to be the first of its kind in decades. The last presidential apology was President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speech offering his short-lived resignation after the humiliation of losing the 1967 war with Israel, said Khaled Fahmy, a liberal historian at the American University in Cairo. "It is the only thing comparable in its clarity," Mr. Fahmy said. (Nasser’'s theatrical resignation was rejected in a staged plebiscite.) . . .

Hmm, isn't the story here perhaps that even the remote precedent of Nasser's mea culpa was bogus?

"With the results confirmed," writes Kirkpatrick, "the new order began to take shape."

The Islamist-dominated upper house of Parliament met on Wednesday for the first time under provisions of the Constitution that empower it to act as the legislature until the election of a new lower house. The upper house had been almost powerless under the former Constitution, but a court order disbanded the more authoritative lower house last spring while Egypt was still under military rule. . . .

The court’s response to the Constitution had been a matter of some suspense. Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies had feared that the court would strike down the assembly that was created to draw up the charter, just as it had dissolved the lower house of Parliament, or would seek to review the Constitution.

You'll recall that it was in anticipation of uppitiness on the part of the court that President Morsi issued "a presidential edict that gave him unchecked authority and polarized an already divided nation while raising a specter, the president's critics charged, of a return to autocracy," as Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported on November 23.

Kirkpatrick notes that just this week the U.S. State Dept., after weeks of "even-handedness," cautiously pointed a finger at the president. Spokesman Patrick Ventrell said:

Democracy requires much more than simple majority rule. It requires protecting the rights and building the institutions that make democracy meaningful and durable. . . . President Morsi, as the democratically elected leader of Egypt, has a special responsibility to move forward in a way that recognizes the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust and broaden support for the political process."

Whether President Morsi has any intention of doing any such thing remains open to question, despite his words Wednesday, when he declared --

that Egypt was "moving steadfastly toward democracy and pluralism." Under the new Constitution, he said, "everyone is equal without any discrimination."

"No matter what were the hardships of the past period, I see it as the pain of birthing the new Egypt," Mr. Morsi said. "It is truly the dawn of the new Egypt, which has risen and is now shining."

Nevertheless, as Peter Hessler wrote recently in a New Yorker "Comment" piece, "Brothers' Keepers," the history of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (dating back to 1928), even allowing for the large underground portion of that history, owing to decades of government suppression, isn't rich with examples of either flexibility or competence in policymaking or governance. Already there is cause for alarm in the government's response to the protests that followed President Morsi's assumption of those new superpowers: "the first clearly documented case of political violence in more than fifty years of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Egypt."

[T]he Brotherhood has failed to evolve in the wake of the revolution. Traditionally, the organization's strengths have been local religious training and charity work, which have made it effective at mobilizing grassroots support for elections. But for decades it was banned from full participation in Egypt's government, so it has never been tested in the more subtle and complicated aspects of national politics. The leadership is dominated by people from technical fields: of the eighteen members of the Brotherhood’'s Guidance Bureau, fifteen are doctors, engineers, or scientists. Their careers may not have taught them the arts of negotiation and compromise, and Morsi, an engineer by training, has shown no real flexibility in response to the unfolding crisis. Eight of his advisers and aides have resigned in the past three weeks. From the outside, it's hard to distinguish between calculation and incompetence. On Sunday evening, the government suddenly announced major tax increases for a wide variety of goods, including gasoline, electricity, cooking oil, cigarettes, and alcohol -- hardly a savvy move in a country with a ravaged economy and an ongoing political crisis. Later that night, after the decree had inspired a mad rush on Cairo liquor stores, Morsi cancelled it with a message posted on his Facebook page at 2:13 a.m.

Nor does there appear to be any effective check on the government's power. "The military seems to be aligned with Morsi, at least for the moment," Hessler writes, "and the country lacks a strong and coherent political alternative to the Brotherhood." "Nevertheless," he writes, "there are some reasons for optimism."

The public response has been impressive, with tens of thousands of peaceful protesters surrounding the palace on many nights. These crowds are largely middle class, but they comprise people from all walks of life, including many who identify themselves as former supporters of Morsi. There are more women than usual. And expectations have changed since the beginning of the revolution. For almost two years, the media have operated with a freedom that never existed under Mubarak, and Egypt has held essentially fair elections for both parliament and the Presidency. Such progress remains fragile, but at least certain demands are being established.

It remains to be seen how the Brotherhood and President Morsi will respond. Hessler has some intriguing comments from Cairo University constitutional-law professor Gaber Gad Nassar, "one of the most prominent members who quit the constituent assembly," who "could be seen as either deeply pessimistic or perversely optimistic, depending on the tone of your inshallah."
The Brotherhood, says Nassar, has "a huge ability to withstand negotiations that never reach anything. . . . They are extremely keen to take over power and use it. However, the biggest problem they face is the lack of talent qualified to do that."

"Critics have always made this point," writes Hessler --

that the worst thing that could happen to the Brotherhood might be a rise to power, because then their weaknesses would be exposed. But this is small consolation in Cairo. The world is full of bad regimes that survive just because they hurt others more than they hurt themselves.

#

Winds Of Change Blowing In Egypt-- But Not Everyone Is Thrilled With The Direction

Last week in Tahrir Square- ©2011 Reese Erlich

How long will it take for Fox News to find this article in the English-language edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm and then start yowling about who lost Egypt... and it won't be McCain or Lieberman they turn their guns on.

Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Hazem Abu Ismail announced his intention to run in Egypt’s upcoming presidential elections.

He said that if elected he would implement Islamic sharia law and cancel the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

...Abu Ismail said that his platform revolves around Islam, while "Mohamed ElBaradei, Amr Moussa, and Hamdeen Sabahi, the liberal candidates, will be unable to present a clear vision” for the country.

“If I could apply sharia in Egypt, all people, including non-Muslims, would applaud me four years later,” said Abu Ismail.

The sheikh said that no current presidential candidate represents the Egyptian people.

“We seek to apply Islamic law, but those who don’t want it prefer cabarets, alcohol, dancers and prostitution, as the implementation of Islamic law will prohibit women to appear naked in movies and on beaches,” Abu Ismail added.

...Concerning the peace treaty with Israel, he said, “The Camp David peace treaty is insulting to the Egyptian people, so it must be canceled, and I will do my best to convince people to cancel it."

Our old friend Reese Erlich is in Cairo this week, on assignment for a number of public radio networks and blogging for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He's been writing about the struggle to determine what kind of new government Egyptians will create post-Mubarak. Last week, on his first day in Egypt he "lit out for Tahrir Square."

Tahrir has taken on mythic status in the Arab world, but it’s really just a large traffic circle surrounded by high rise buildings. At one point several million people filled the square, symbolically stopping the government, and leading to the overthrow of the autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak.

On this day, however, only a few thousand rallied here, chanting slogans against the military government that took over from Mubarak, and demanding release of political prisoners. Dozens had been arrested on May 15 for protesting in front of the Israeli Embassy. They were tried in military, not civilian, courts. Under popular pressure, one week later, almost all the protesters were given one-year suspended sentences and released. The military also released over a hundred demonstrators from previous protests.

And that’s the contradiction facing today’s Egypt. The old dictatorship has been replaced with a military council that carries out many of the same domestic and foreign policies as Mubarak, according to the Tahrir activists. It arbitrarily arrests dissidents, and still engages in abuse and torture. Tahrir activists want the military out of power as soon as possible.

But many other Egyptians support the military as a force for stability. They see developments in Syria and Libya, where most of the military supports the old regime, and praise the Egyptian Army for forestalling a similar disaster.

“We should give the government some time,” truck driver Ahmad Fathi tells me. “We shouldn’t have sit-ins and demonstrations every day. We need time for things to get back to normal.”

Tahrir activists admit they’ve got a lot of organizing to do if they are to have a significant impact on the wider public. “We need 5 million in the streets to make change,” Tahrir Square leader Tarek Shalaby tells me.

Everyone is scrambling to prepare for parliamentary elections now scheduled for sometime in September. Presidential elections may be held two months later, although no date has been set. Tahrir Square activists are hoping to consolidate their gains by backing leftist candidates. But so far the conservative Muslim Brotherhood and elements from Mubarak’s old party, the National Democratic Party, seem better organized.

Meanwhile, workers continue wildcat strikes demanding higher wages. Violent conflicts have broken out between extremist Muslims and Coptic Christians. And activists have called for a mass mobilization against the military government to be held in Tahrir on May 27.

The revolution is far from over.

This morning Reese sent us an update from Cairo as he prepares to set out for his next stop: Gaza via the newly-opened Rafah crossing. He writes that "for many young activists Egypt’s revolution isn’t over" and describes a large Tahrir Square rally he covered-- over 100,000 people-- Friday. It had been called by many of the same people who had called the rallies and demonstrations that had toppled the Mubarak regime this past January and February.

They demanded that a civilian dominated council take over from the current all-military government. They wanted an end to military trials for civilians and stronger protection for Coptic Christians being violently attacked by Muslim extremists. They were angry that former President Hosni Mubarak and his entourage weren’t already facing trials for corruption and ordering the murder of protesters.

Student activist Shimaa Helmy told me, “This is our day of anger because we feel our revolution is being taken over by people who didn’t participate.”

But the Moslem Brotherhood, which did participate in the Tahrir Square uprising, boycotted today’s event. Officially, Brotherhood leaders were affronted because they weren’t consulted about rally plans. But many protesters believe that the Brotherhood’s senior leadership doesn’t want to offend the military.

Some Moslem Brotherhood youth defied their leaders and came anyway. The Brotherhood faces numerous internal contradictions, with two of its former leaders announcing plans to run for president. They defied Brotherhood national leadership’s decision not to run anyone for president and to run parliamentary candidates for not more than 50% of the eligible seats.

Many of the demonstrators were middle class, but workers and urban poor also attended. Activist Helmy admits, however, that the mainly secular and leftist demonstrators had their work cut out to win over ordinary Egyptians.

“Some people are starting to hate the uprising,” she told me. “The prices are getting high, and they think it’s the revolution. We’re trying to explain ‘it’s for you, not just for us.’”

Pro-military government rallies were called in other parts of Cairo and a few hundred supporters showed up.

Protesters argued that popular support for the military is declining. They saw today’s demonstration as one more battle in what promises to be a long struggle for power.

To the degree most Americans have any interest in what's going on in Egypt, it revolves around how the events there-- a country of over 80 million people with immense influence on the entire Arab world-- impacts Israel's 7 million people. But, as Robert Naiman wrote for Common Dreams yesterday, "You can't love democracy and denigrate protest, because protest is part of democracy. It's a package deal. Likewise, you can't claim solidarity with Egyptian protesters when they take down a dictator, but act horrified that the resulting government in Egypt, more accountable to Egyptian public opinion, is more engaged in supporting Palestinian rights. It's a package deal."

It was the Tahrir uprising that brought about an Egyptian government more accountable to public opinion, and it was inevitable that an Egyptian government more accountable to public opinion would open Rafah, because public opinion in Egypt bitterly opposed Egyptian participation in the blockade on Gaza.

In addition, opening Rafah was a provision of the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation accord brokered by the Egyptian government-- an achievement facilitated by the fact that the post-Tahrir Egyptian government was more flexible in the negotiations with Hamas that led to the accord.

Mubarak had a deal with the U.S. government: I obey all your commands on the Israel-Palestine issue, and in exchange, you shut your mouth about human rights and democracy. Tahrir destroyed this bargain, because it forced the U.S. to open its mouth about human rights and democracy in Egypt, regardless of Egypt's stance on Israel-Palestine. When it became clear to Egypt's rulers that subservience to the U.S. on Israel-Palestine would no longer purchase carte blanche on human rights and democracy, there was no reason to slavishly toe the U.S. line on Israel-Palestine anymore.

The Mubarak regime also had a domestic motivation for enforcing the blockade: it saw Hamas as a sister organization of Egypt's then semi-illegal opposition Muslim Brotherhood, and it saw enforcing the blockade as a means of denying Hamas "legitimacy," figuring that more "legitimacy" for Hamas would mean more "legitimacy" for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, thereby threatening Mubarak's iron grip on Egypt's politics.

But of course post-Tahrir developments in Egypt threw that calculation out the window: the post-Mubarak government in Egypt has reconciled with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a de facto partner in the present interim government, and is expected to do well in September's parliamentary elections. It would be absurd for the Egyptian government to try to isolate the Muslim Brotherhood by trying to isolate its sister Hamas, when the Muslim Brotherhood is de facto part of the Egyptian government and the role of the Brotherhood in running Egypt is likely to increase.

“One Man, One Vote, One Time?”

Does Madison have a Tahrir Square?

Our old friend, author Reese Erlich is just back from a book tour. Reese, who wrote Conversations With Terrorists: Middle East Leaders On Politics, Violence, and Empire and The Iran Agenda, is one of the only on-the-ground experts on the Middle East I know. Yesterday, we talked about developments in that part of the world and he told me that "especially after the November elections, some American activists felt defeated and rather pessimistic about the prospects for progressive change in the US. Imagine how the people of Egypt and Tunisia felt up until a month ago-- and look at what they did! The popular uprisings in the Middle East will have a big impact on Obama's policies. I don't expect Americans to occupy Times Square and proclaim a revolution-- but I do expect people to take inspiration and organize in our own way." Of course, in Madison, Wisconsin where ultra-reactionary Governor Scott Walker, makes Obama look like Spartacus or Danton, the same coalition of workers and young people who toppled Mubarak and Ben Ali are already taking to the streets! Today the battlelines are drawn in Libya, Bahrain and Iran, where the autocratic leadership will stop at nothing to hold onto power and where blood is already flowing.

Monday Reese put some of his thoughts on the developments (in Cairo, not Madison) into context at Common Dreams and asked me to share them with DWT readers:

Democracy demonstrators in Egypt had not yet overthrown the Mubarak dictatorship when American pundits were issuing dire warnings. “One Man, One Vote, One Time” became their mantra, indicating that extremist Islamic forces would come to power in Egypt and never allow a second round of elections. (Not surprisingly, the slogan assumes voters are men.)

Israeli leaders and unrepentant neoconservatives in the US were particularly vociferous. The catch phrase plays on legitimate fears that a popular uprising can be hijacked by anti-democratic forces. These folks argue that Egypt could end up with a religious-based dictatorship worse than Mubarak.

There’s only one problem with the catch phrase. It’s never happened!

Extremists using the name of Islam have created brutal regimes in today’s Iran and during Taliban rule in Afghanistan. But they came to power as a result of violent upheaval-- not popular elections. When self-proclaimed Islamic parties have actually won fair elections, they also play by the parliamentary rules, even when they lose. Let’s look at the record:

Conservative Islamic parties in Malaysia won control of a provincial government and seats in the national parliament. They have not seized power and continue to abide by parliamentary norms.
Abdurrahman Wahid, leader of a major Islamic party, was elected president of Indonesia in 1999 and left office in 2001.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, with roots in conservative Islam, governs today abiding by parliamentary rules. No one doubts that if it loses fair elections, it will step down peacefully.

Hezbollah consistently wins seats in Lebanon’s parliament and participates in coalition governments. At times it has been part of the majority and at times part of the minority. Hezbollah acknowledges that multi-religious Lebanon will never become an Islamic state. At times Hezbollah has used its armed militia to pressure the government, but so have pro-US parties who also maintain their own, less organized armed groups. US and Israeli leaders object to Hezbollah not for its internal role in Lebanese politics but because Hezbollah is a military obstacle to future Israeli invasions of Lebanon.

Hamas won free and fair Palestinian Authority elections in 2006. U.S. and Israeli leaders vilified the elections and fanned up divisions among Palestinians. Ultimately armed battles broke out between Hamas and Fateh (the main party within the PLO). It was the US and Israel that allowed only “one election, one time” in Gaza. They have no intention of allowing any more free elections until their designated parties can win.

Iran is more complicated. In 1979 a broad-based, popular revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah (king). Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini played a prominent role in the revolution and his forces ultimately imposed a right-wing, repressive regime, using Islam as the justification. Iran’s elections were never genuinely democratic because the religious leaders held real power. Khomeini came to power through violent upheaval, not elections.

And that’s why Egypt will not become “another Iran.” The Moslem Brotherhood has a popular base but did not try to seize the political initiative during the popular uprising. In fact, it didn’t support the popular demonstrations for the first few days.

The Brotherhood has no armed militia and has participated in parliamentary elections for decades. While there may be factions within the Brotherhood who advocate an un-democratic, Islamic state governed by an extremist version of Sharia law, those forces received no popular support during the uprising.

The Brotherhood leadership seems committed to participating in fair elections and, if it does not win a majority, working in coalition with other parties. If it attempts to seize power, the same people who occupied Tahrir Square will be out in the streets once again.

The U.S. intentionally exaggerates the threat of extremist Islam, much as it distorted the threat of communism during the Cold War. In fact, the argument that “totalitarian communist parties” might win one election and never allow them again began during the Cold War.

Historically, US leaders have cared little about elections in the Arab world and far more about US corporate and military interests. Oil, military bases and support for Israel are far more important than democratic institutions.

In reality the US demands neither one person, one vote nor one election.

No one knows exactly what the future holds for Egypt. As of this writing, a junta of Mubarak military leaders rule Egypt, having dissolved the parliament and abolished the undemocratic constitution. The US is working overtime to find some new, pro-US military leader to rule the country under the guise of making a “transition” to democracy.

The US fears an Egypt with genuinely free press, freedom to organize unions and civic organizations, and freedom to form independent political parties. Many of those institutions will sharply oppose US Middle East policy and pressure Israel to reach a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

The weeks ahead will determine the progress towards real democracy in Egypt. The main danger comes not from radical Islamists intent on imposing a new dictatorship but from pro-US generals who want to maintain the old one.