Saturday, February 12, 2011

A WASTED REVOLUTION, WHAT A BUNCH OF DUPES

Because of who I am, I am very sensitive when it comes to name calling and ethnic slurs. My hackles bristle, wrong metaphor, try “rise”, when somebody starts talking about dumb Polacks, greedy Jews, smelly Pakis, stupid Spics, Greasers and Beaners. There are a lot more, but there is no reason to list them all.
When it comes to ethnic slurs there is one that I do not condemn. That is the universal slight of “stupid” when applied to any country or people that deserve it.
          Egyptians have just earned the Olympic Gold Medal for Stupidity, all 70 million of them. They deserve whatever the future holds for them, for they have surely screwed themselves royally even though most of them do not remember or were alive when King Farouk was sacked in ‘52. They have exhibited ignorance and stupidity. I don’t care what their IQ and SAT scores are, or those other indices of intelligence and knowledge we use to judge others. They are just plain dumb.
          Here they are jubilantly dancing and a’prancing in the streets having forced a doddering 82 year old tyrant Hosni Mubarak from office, leaving in place all those others that enabled him to hold power. A dictator with jet black dyed hair as glossy as Italy’s Berlusconi’s. What a hollow victory, what a wasted effort, what a failed revolution!
          Power was wrested from the hands of a criminal American backed and financed despot after 30 years. After enduring years of repression, torture and corruption, first under Anwar Sadat and then Mubarak, Egyptians took to the streets for three weeks of protest and a relatively peaceful revolution, even though a number of “martyr” deaths and casualties have been reported. What did this ruckus, this wasted effort, these sacrifices achieve?
Well, let me tell you, nothing, nada. Power first shifted from President Mubarak to Vice President Omar Suleiman. By the way, there was no Vice President for 30 years. An office recently created for a man who was the Chief of Mubarak’s General Intelligence Directorate to try to help Mubarak retain power. “Intelligence” in like the guy that ran the secret jails and helped us commit rendition crimes of torture. Change what change? Now the power has been vested in the “High Council of the Armed Forces” lead by Mubarak’s Defense Minister Mohamed Tantawi. Democracy what democracy? No, the road to another repressive regime.
As the French are wont to say “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. Or in this case the Egyptians, just when I thought they couldn’t be any dumber, they go and do something like this, to paraphrase Dum & Dumber, the movie, remember? Throwing out one dictatorship in exchange for another.        

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

DEMOCRACY CAN TURN AROUND AN BITE YOU IN THE ....

          This post is going to be short, sweet and to the point, not researched, off the cuff, by the seat of my pants, shooting from the hip, blind justice, on the fly, off the top of my head, at the drop of a hat, without beating around the bush and full of clichés.
          Beware of what you wish for, especially in Cairo, North Africa, the Middle and the Far East. Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t. Because if you do: You will be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
          Any change in Egypt will put the United States between a rock and a hard place. For years we have advocated the spread of democracy in the most unlikely of places. We publicly declare that “Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destructions. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect for the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terrorism. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer –so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause.” George W. Bush, State of The Union Speech, 2006. What self serving crap, and a flagrant lie to boot.
          All this while we were supporting President Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year reign of terror to the tune of $1.3 billion a year in military aid to what has now been proven to be a failed dictatorship. That is in addition to billions of aid to failed states, Iraq and Afghanistan included, and $349 million to Tunisia’s deposed former President Ben Ali, now basking in the sun in Saudi Arabia. Would that the United States and Presidents Bush and Obama put their mouths were our money was being wasted.
          But even if they had put their money where their mouths were, the democracy they want is only democracy that we favor. They forget, and don’t want us to know, that in the 2005 Egyptian elections 88 seats, or 20% of the 444 parliamentary seats were won by the Muslim Brotherhood. In the January 2006 Palestinian Parliamentary Elections Hamas, the political wing of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, won 56% of the parliamentary seats.
          If you truly support democracy in its rawest form, be prepared to have that democracy, one that we may well not like and that may well hate us, come back and bite us in the ass.