Throw All Bums Out
Why stop with Egypt? Let the revolutionary wildfire spread across borders and continents and into conference rooms. Get rid of every greedy, corrupted and insensitive top dog in every country, city, corporation and poorly-managed Walmart. Cleanse the world of all snakes and dogs in one great tidal backwash. Obviously I’m joking, but why can’t the fever just spread up and down the Nile and out into the Mediterranean and across the oceans? The idea is thrilling.
Yesterday morning the conventional wisdom was that either that (a) Mubarak, his family and associates leave Cairo in a helicopter in the wee hours, or (b) Cairo will become another Tiananmen Square. Now the word is that Cairo cops and the military are holding back, and that Mubarak and his family leaving is only a matter of time.
I love this paragraph from a recent Huffington Post summary: “A 43-year-old teacher, Rafaat Mubarak, said the appointment of the president’s intelligence chief and longtime confidant, Omar Suleiman, as vice president did not satisfy the protesters. ‘This is all nonsense,’ he said. ‘They will not fool us anymore. We want the head of the snake. If he is appointed by Mubarak, then he is just one more member of the gang. We are not speaking about a branch in a tree, we are talking about the roots.”
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
The citizens of Egypt are protesting against a corrupt government in a country where a very, very small percentage of the population controls most of the country’s wealth.
Yep, that doesn’t sound at all like our country…
Egypt is likely to become more like Iran once the dust clears. But we can hope.
It has to be an orderly transition. Right now the opposition has no control over the mobs. El Baradei sounds reasonable but he has little grass roots support. I don’t want to see Mubarak replaced by an Ayatollah but if it’s a violent takeover, they’ll likely lean in that direction. Al Jazeera isn’t agitating in favor of moderates. .
You know you’re talking about a sorry state when DeeZee is right on the money. Cripes…
Look, “revolution” like this ALWAYS looks adorable to Americans because our “version” of it was against a foriegn power who went home afterwards, there was a solid “big picture” power-structure ready to take charge, and it mostly worked out for the best. That almost NEVER happens in any other case – most of the time you wind up with the French Revolution, i.e. mindless anarchy ultimately leading to Napoleanic despotism.
The thing to remember when you see stuff like this going down in the Arab World is that you’re basically looking at the Muslim equivalent of the Teabaggers: Angry for angry’s sake, only the vaugest sense of purpose and very little intellectual direction behind all the sound and fury. Yeah, the “average Egyptian” probably has a point about Mubarak being corrupt, and the Baggers have (kind of) a point about wasteful spending – but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to let a church-crazed ignoramous like Palin run the country; any more than it’s a good idea to let whatever sort of person “speaks to” the street-level protestors in Cairo (in all likelihood: a similarly church-crazed fundie wacko with an agenda) take over there.
Nobody likes to say this, because it sounds “mean” and anti-idealistic, but guess what: “Democracy” is only as good it’s citizens, and in places where there’s a MASSIVE disparity not only in wealth but in education and “worldliness” it may not always be the best idea. How does having the Egyptian equivalent of Glenn Beck in charge of an entire country and it’s military sound to you? Because if this thing goes down bad, THAT’S what your gonna get.
Mubarak’s first mistake was firing his cabinet. It showed the rioting worked and only emboldened them.
I agree with MovieBob. We–or rather Bush and his cronies–got rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And look what happened? It not only strengthened the terrorists but it also strengthened Iran. I always thought it was a HUGE mistake to get rid of Hussein despite how much I thought he was a lousy leader. The same could be said for Egypt now.
Eh… can’t go all the way THERE with ya, 400blows. Mubarak is an autocrat and probably a power-driven jerk, but Saddam was murdering people. That’s not to say I was “for” the Iraq War, but a difference is a difference.
Also, in “colder” terms, Egypt is WAY more important than Iraq geopolitically. Egypt, under Mubarak, was really the only pro-Israel (or at least pro-peace-WITH-Israel) “check” against the rest of the Arab League. Whoever replaces Mubarak, if he is indeed replaced, the FIRST thing they’ll do is score popularity-points by realigning that position and ramping up the anti-semitism – because the ONLY thing that the entirety of the “street level” Middle East more-or-less agrees on is hating Jews.
Didn’t you just spend a couple of weeks hobnobbing with some of the most privileged people on the face of the Earth? “No, I mean the BAD rich people.”
“Nobody likes to say this, because it sounds “mean” and anti-idealistic, but guess what: “Democracy” is only as good it’s citizens”
And the answer is, What the fuck is wrong with the United States?
“and in places where there’s a MASSIVE disparity not only in wealth but in education and “worldliness” it may not always be the best idea.”
Actually, one of Egypt’s biggest problems in the last few decades has been that very intelligent, highly educated people, have had to contemplate careers considerably beneath their educational level. More than a few turned to the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical islamic groups.
“How does having the Egyptian equivalent of Glenn Beck in charge of an entire country and it’s military sound to you? Because if this thing goes down bad, THAT’S what your gonna get.”
It shouldn’t shock anyone if that is, in fact, what we get. It is not, however, a sure thing by any stretch. I was a lot more sure that the Green Revolution in Iran would end the way it did than I am of Egypt sliding into the nuthouse. Mubarik is widely viewed as a Washington puppet, so whoever, whatever replaces him will probably be less friendly to the US, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The Shah’s repression of his people for 30 years exploded into the Iranian revolution. If the U.S. doesn’t want another country heading in that direction then maybe they should, you know, stop proping up autocrats who employ torture against their own people.
Bob: Nah. I’d say the difference between the Egyptians and the tea-baggers is that the Egyptians aren’t going bat-shit nuts just because the guy in charge is black. And our revolution obviously didn’t solve everything, as the War of 1812, the Farmer’s Rebellion, and the Civil War prove. But our pop culture and history books like emphasizing those incidents as separate phenomenon unrelated to the management of our system of government, even though we’ve clearly had plenty of unstable moments in our history-including that Loughner fuck. As for hating on Israel, the Egyptians don’t like dealing with Palestinian suicide bombers any more than Jordan, so I think they’ll still be friends.
Also, as I noted before, Iran is a different country
religiously than Egypt. In fact, they’re probably the last political model anyone in the Middle East wants to emulate. The reason Iraq turned out into a mess was because our ex-Commander-in-Chief INO didn’t know that there are two types of Muslims, or that his daddy worked with Ronnie specifically to oppress the type of Muslim which constituted the ethnic majority, in order to maintain a united front against the Commies-and keep Iran in check. So when Saddam’s Sunni minority got dethroned, all hell broke loose.
Of course, he could’ve used what happened to Yugoslavia when the Soviet Union collapsed, or Rwanda as a reference, or even what Cheney the Dick said a decade earlier when he was against staying in Iraq indefinitely. But Jesus told Dubya that he had to break a few omelettes to make some eggs, and we’re paying for it now.
Now, this situation is different from Iran, because Mubarak was a latent puppet of ours. That is, unlike the Shah, he usurped the opposition himself without us actually lifting a finger. But unlike other Arab strong-men in the region, Mubarack maintained power by not singling out random Egyptians to play “hide-the-taser”. And it worked for decades until a little phenomenon called global warming destroyed that country’s crops, and contributed to higher food prices. Mubarak could’ve declared some sort of emergency to help the public, but he never actually had to govern the place, so he let his country-men rot on the vine, and they’re just re-paying the favor. Oh, and I just read that Iraq’s own water supply’s so low, they can’t even run their dams, so I just can’t *wait* ’til *we’re* next.
Spindozer: “Actually, one of Egypt’s biggest problems in the last few decades has been that very intelligent, highly educated people, have had to contemplate careers considerably beneath their educational level”
And that’s different from our situation because…?
It’s amusing reading people who seem to have little understanding of the situation, or of Egypt itself, pontificate about what’s going on there now.
Like SpinDozer says, this isn’t some “revolution” being driven by poor, anti-intellectual Islamists. This is about the middle-class, and the educated, and the young, all fed-up that their economy is in the toilet, that with their education they can’t get jobs, and that their country is run by an autocrat who doesn’t want to give up power but has no idea at all how to make their lives any better. They are absolutely NOT like the teabaggers.
Also, there is NO WAY that the next government starts making noises against Israel. They’re smarter than that. Maybe they’ll say something in public about supporting Palestine or whatever, but actions speak louder than words… and there’s no way after 30-some years of peace that they throw that away.
Relax. The chance that Egypt ends up like Iran are remote. The Muslim Brotherhood will make their push, but this isn’t driven by fundamentalism — the people don’t want an unforgiving theocratic state that cracks down on what they have now. (And Iran is Shiite… Egypt Sunni, which is another big reason this won’t end up “just like Iran.” They also won’t like the Iranians trying to influence things.)
Farmer’s Rebellion=Shay’s Rebellion.
I agree with your sentiment Jeff, however what’s happening in Egypt is what Americans should have done two years ago to your financial institutions. Citizens of the USA should have stormed Wall Street and demanded justice – but you didn’t. You tucked tail and herded your heads into the sand like good cattle.
“Democracy is comin’ to the USA…”
As soon as we get a new Supreme Court. And lose our video games.
Rob: No one thought it was going to get worse than that crash, or that our pols would be more concerned with maintaining those institutions than they were with saving our asses.
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