Friday, February 11, 2011

Obama: Time to grow up and man up

Frank Wisner, a Smarter Hillary Clinton [or Anyone in the Obama Menagerie]

[Posted as a comment originally at The American Thinker, a message said that the contents couldn't be posted, so I'll throw it up here for your education and edification. Some duplication with my previous post may occur.]

Obama continues to drop the ball more often than Adrian Peterson did with the Vikings, and it's starting to look as if Panetta and Clapper were recruited in an audition for a Three Stooges remake, with Obama serving as Larry---Biden doesn't fit so well as a Stooge, so maybe the Marx Brothers with Clapper as Harpo. After King Abdullah did his call to Mubarak, an old friend and ally, to assure him not to worry if the US starts to threaten to pull the security assistance plug or economic aid programs, because the Magic Kingdom would come to the rescue, I believe the Egyptians knew they had an implicit blank check. They also knew that the disaster of the Jan, 2006 Palestinian elections resulting in a Hamas takeover of Gaza was still sticking in Israel's craw, having been strong-armed by an adolescent idealist named Condi into including these Islamist thugs on the ballot.

King Abdullah has always had a soft spot for Lebanon, with wives who hailed from that former Switzerland of the Middle East and only functioning Arab democracy [four decades back], and he's watching the Palestinians and Bedouins close to civil strife in Jordan. Lebanon has already gone over to the dark side in a coup de pouce by Hezbollah while young Saad Hariri was in DC, showing deception and guile worthy of their Persian overlords. King Abdullah doesn't want his Hashemite namesake to also be in a civil strife. Yemen is boiling over on the Kingdom's southwest border which is more porous than the Mexico/US boundary by far.

My strong feeling is that with Frank Wisner, a man far wiser than anyone on the current WH staff and a strong friend of Egypt, telling the EU in Munich that because of a constitutional quirk that demands elections be held in ninety days if Mubarak resigns, an impossible goal if stability is to be maintained, that Hosni should stay on as a figurehead and let Omar Suleiman do the day-to-day governing until September. may have been the bit of encouragement that pushed Mubarak to stay on, at least as a figurehead.

Now the witless adolescent golden boy with the jug ears has to grow up and wear long pants, metaphorically speaking. Manning up may be difficult for this lover of bland bromides and split-the-difference nostrums. Tomorrow, the mosques may be as angy as hornets' nests poked with sticks, but remember the 13 Vendemiaire---that whiff of grapeshot that led to Napoleon's ascendancy. Bad comparison, but we have to remember what happened when the Girondins lost to the Jacobins, and thousands died in the September Massacres. Each revolution is different, but almost all devour their own children. the mob in Tahrir may be quiescent for the moment, but if things heat up after Friday prayers, we'll see if the Egyptian Army can maintain order or else fractures into a well-armed and undisciplined mob capable of anything. That's when the real crunch occurs. If I were a western newsperson with a camera crew, Greg Palkot might have got off easy if things get really out of control and, names already having been taken, the violence hits the Fourth Estate. Too bad Christiane and Anderson aren't there on the ground doing play-by-play...!

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