YAY Arab Spring!!!!
Judges overseeing the vote count in Egypt’s parliamentary elections say Islamist parties have won a majority of the contested seats in the first round. The judges spoke on condition of anonymity because official results are expected to be released later Thursday.
They say the Muslim Brotherhood could take 45 percent of the seats up for grabs. The liberal Egyptian bloc coalition and the ultra-fundamentalist Nour party are competing for second place.
Together, Islamist parties are expected to control a majority of parliamentary seats by March. This week’s vote was the first of six stages of parliamentary elections that will last until then.
Obama = FAIL.
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
This one has little to do with any direct action by Obama, but it will if it happens in Libya.
OTOH to the extent that he might have sat there and heaped salivating praise upon it, it points an unmistakeable finger at his inability to see anything other than the brightest of silver linings in any cloud.
TBH I thought this might just work out well – right at the start. The longer things went on, the more depressed I got. And rightly so.
At least when this is all over, and the entire Arab world has radically Islamified, the options will be narrowed and made clear. And they won’t be pretty. Hopefully we will (a) get there in time to preserve at least a part of Israel intact and (b) fight the subsequent war while we still have massive technological superiority.
And if they really want to live in the 7th Century, let’s bloody bomb them hard enough to make sure they stay there for a very long time.
Ahh, Islamist democracy at work; one man, one vote, …one time. Once the Islamists are entrenched the Revolutionary Islamic Republic is declared and like Iran the clerics and their allies will never give-up power. The Liberals and the Copts will be ground-up as fertilizer….
If this is an Obama fail, where are the Gay Patriot posts (and subsequent comments) that spoke against the Arab Spring earlier in the year. If I remember correctly, GP had very little to say about Egypt this year. I understand criticizing him for his mistakes, but to pin this on him seems overzealous.
Dan was on the fence, like myself.
The other post comes from you, Bruce. Along with inquiring about the whereabouts of Sean Penn, you suggest a criticism of Obama’s laissez-faire approach, without actually getting specific about what he should be doing. How convenient.
He’s damned if he does and he’s damend if he doesn’t.
Huh?
GayPatriot is supposed to out think the government apparatus paid to keep track of the political winds in Egypt?
While all sorts of people were swooning over the Arab Spring, plenty of us cynics were cautioning people to get a clearer grasp on what was happening.
Remember when the media floated the idea that Bush was blindsided by thinking that American troops in Iraq would be welcomed with open arms? Did it seem to you that any part of our strategy and the days following the entry into Baghdad played out being structured around that mythical strategy?
Well, the US sat back and let the Egyptian Arab Spring play out. And it was always pretty clear that either the military would take control or the Muslim Brotherhood would take control. But there was no way a nascent Egyptian democratic revolution would rise up and triumph.
Mubarak, like the King of Morocco, the House of Saud, the King of Jordon and the rulers of Kuwait, Dubai and the UAE, all know what they are dealing with. The Muslim Brotherhood and the tension between the Shiites and the Sunnis and the problems between the Persians, Kurds, Arabs and Baathists make the Arab world a crazy quilt of fundamentalist zealots controlled by tyrants.
Furthermore, we have not seen the end of the Arab Spring in Egypt by any stretch of the imagination. The country is broke and the food supply is critically low. Which group is better equipped to handle the chaos: the military muscle and structure or the Muslim Brotherhood which is dealing with internal struggles over how deep and pervasive Sharia is to be enforced?
If Obama is an isolationist, then he has not failed. If he is even moderately engaged in international relations and US security, he has certainly had plenty of rumination time on the golf course to come up with a policy outline.
I meant to conclude that Obama forced Mubarak out and then walked away and let the Arab Spring chips fall where they may. We have not yet seen the velvet glove of El Baradei in the current shaking and rumbling from within the crater of volcanic change that is building up pressure throughout North Africa. The dictators in the wings have a lean and hungry eye on daily events.
And has anyone heard a peep from the UN recently?
So… according to ItchySnatchy’s logic… it’s not an Obama failure… unless one of the author’s of this blog commented on it six months ago and predicted failure?
Is that my take away from his 10:09 PM post? Or, was that just a really weak attempt to deflect criticism from the feckless and incompetent Democrat in the Oval Office? (Who presumably should have had better intelligence into the Egyptian political scene than our humble blog captains.)
Wow. I wish I got paid for all of this power I’m accused of having…
Holding his feet to the fire now would make more sense after a history of criticism. Here, you just create a win/win argument for yourself, Bruce.
And, VTK gets my personal vote for new best reconfiguration of my internet handle. Perhaps if ND30 had half his imagination, he might come up with something mildly amusing for once.
Well, there is a case to be made for building up a series of charges in order to justify pronouncing: I told your so!!! I did not see Bruce making that pronouncement.
There is a case to be made for saying “DUH” if Bruce has only now come to the epiphany that Obama dropped the ball in Egypt. I did not see Bruce reaching such and epiphany.
There is a case to be made that in regard to how Obama handled Egypt that “Obama=FAIL”. However, you are making an entirely different case.
You are saying that any remark be conditionally based on prior remarks that build your case. But that is the classic conundrum of the chicken or the egg or if Adam and Eve had navels. How does one make an initial statement if a history of statements must proceed it?
Look, Bruce posts irregularly. Unlike Dan, you will not find that Bruce is engaging in developing themes to his posts. If that is not up to your standards, then carp away. But, I must say in all my broken record glory that you are yet again engaging in moral relativism: When the rules don’t apply to make your case, make up rules to support your case.
Now, I understand that on your part this is just a mild rebuke given in the spirit of criticism. Fine. But since you took the time to come back and lay out part of your philosophy on criticism, I thought you might like to know why I think your criticism is full of holes.
Obama is supposed to know more about the world (including Islamism) than Bruce or Dan. First, don’t you remember, Obama is sooo smaaaaaaaaaaart? Second, Obama gets daily intelligence briefings about the real (and enormous) threats to us.
Here’s what’s happening. After 9-11, Bush rightly said, this dictator-supporting stuff (of past administrations) isn’t working. We stand for democracy and freedom, and we should show it by using major force to put a democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Iraq is a good candidate because it’s in that heart, it flanks a serious enemy (Iran), and because Saddam is a WMD-seeking sponsor of terrorism who has got to go in any case. So Bush led us into Iraq (with Democrats’ then-full-hearted approval). Now you can argue with Bush’s nation-building logic, and you can also argue that the execution was poor until 2007, Teh Surge. But the point is that Bush threw America’s weight around with moral confidence – the confidence that America was worth protecting, was doing the right thing, and would therefore rightly pick and choose who it would support in a process of slowly replacing Middle Eastern dictators with pro-American democracies. In other words: Bush was all about establishing democracy in the Middle East on America’s terms. Now comes Obama, who inherits the Bush success in Iraq, but who thinks in his heart that America sucks ass and should be “fundamentally transformed” into a weak, Euro-socialist mess. He follows Bush’s Iraq withdrawal timetable, but muffs it at the end by NOT ensuring a continued U.S. presence in Iraq (a la Japan or South Korea) – arguably turning the country over to an enemy, Iran. He apologizes for America whenever he can, and undermines Israel as much as Congress / electoral politics will let him. When he projects American power, as in Libya, he does so in violation of the War Powers Act, and where no real American interests are involved. In other words, yes he is an incompetent asshole. He is NOT morally confident in America, and does NOT project American power effectively and intelligently to ensure the progress of Middle Eastern democracy on America’s terms. That’s the difference. Sensing the difference, and probably also supported by agents of Iran, Russia or maybe China (I don’t know), the people of the Middle East are now being led by Islamists. That sucks.
Criticize my conjectures, but I know in my heart that I just told the truth.
Sensing the difference, and probably also supported by agents of Iran, Russia or maybe China (I don’t know), the people of the Middle East are now being led by Islamists. That sucks.
It does, but Russia and China have enough problems with their own Islamist minorities that they should be careful of adding fuel to the fire, even to strengthen their position vis a vis America. With someone like Obama in charge, there are less risky ways to do that.
The old enemies in the Mideast wanted Israel gone, sure, but ultimately they knew the meaning of restraint – the people coming in now, I fear, do not, and the Russians and Chinese really ought not to employ them as proxies unless they want to be bitten hard on the hand by the mouth they’ve just fed. Iran, of course, is a different kettle of fish entirely.
Yes… but I doubt they are. Iran, Russia and China all want the U.S. out of the Middle East by whatever means (so they can have it). U.S. did the same thing in the 1980s, when we backed Islamists (what became al Qaeda) against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Don’t you just know that Putin and his band of KGB plotters are having a field day keeping track of the daily, if not hourly, gifts that Obambi keeps sending them. Of course, Obambi, on the other hand, is certain he has Putin locked up and incapacitated.
Can you think of an American President who has done more for radical Islam?
with regard to Russia and China:
1. they back the Iranian Mullahs. This was obvious during the 2009 protests.
2. They backed Gadhafi and found themselves on the losing side.
3. they back Asshat in Syria. In other words they back the Ba’ath Party.
You will very likely find them involved in Lebanon as well.
I suspect that Russia wants the outcome in Egypt. Nasser was pro-Russian, and I suspect that Russia will try to be a sphere of influence in Egypt.
The loss of influence in Libya is now a very interesting conundrum. Britain and France have gain influence in that country. The Islamists have not as yet taken over, and btw you cannot introduce Sharia when it is already in place!!
Prepare for war.
I wonder if this is really an Obama failure or an Obama triumph. I think he is a closeted muslim. He has done more to help islamists than to minimize their influence in the middle east. Let´s see what happens in Libya.