Morsi Power Grab One Day After Gaza Settlement

The 51% victor in the recent Egyptian elections for President sure doesn't waste any time. He emasculates the Army, no mean feat in itself, then brokers a Gaza cease fire, finally seizes all the reins of power in Misr, named for the black mud in the Delta.

I've been to almost two dozen Arab countries as an FSO [missed Djibouti & Libya] & to Egypt many times. The concepts of Islam & democracy are mutually exclusive [I am a State Dept. trained Arabist] & Arab history since the Hegira shows little evidence of any forms of government save autocracy by a strongman with religious credentials---Morsi is just the latest example. Islamists are like Communists---once you vote them in, that's the last election you'll have that is not totally rigged.

Morsi seems not to have learned any lessons in democracy and the silly amateur in the WH in DC elected by the new majority of leeches, minorities, slackers and layabouts---generally the Lumpenproletariat Marx despised, but which in the US loves Marx [if the illiterate loons ever heard of him].

Barry Soetero couldn't find Egypt on a map before he was elected and I doubt if his high-flying paeans to democracy before he got his ridiculous Nobel mean anything to this scandalous fraud anymore. Now he's free to get himself out of the jam he's in, and figure out how to make people think he's not a witless chump on Benghazi & Cairo.

UPDATE: David Kirkpatrick of the NYT reports on Morsi's power grab obliquely, but gets to a level of disapproval.

Mr. Morsi, an Islamist and Egypt’s first elected president, portrayed his decree as an attempt to fulfill popular demands for justice and protect the transition to a constitutional democracy. But the unexpected breadth of the powers he seized raised immediate fears that he might become a new strongman. Seldom in history has a postrevolutionary leader amassed so much personal power only to relinquish it swiftly.

What an understatement! When the Free Officers' Movement secured a figurehead like Naguib and the segued swiftly to Nasser in the early '50's, there was no fig leaf of legitimacy---only a call for pan-Arab & later a Bandung Conference in Indonesia for ALL the impoverished ex-colonial states. Sadat was a later improvement after Nasser died fifteen years after he seized power & Mubarak improved on Sadat slightly. Now Morsi is reverting back to the original Muhammad Ali strongman template of the early 19th c.

In Washington, a senior State Department official said, “We are seeking more information about President Morsi’s decisions and declarations today, which have raised concerns.”

Mr. Morsi’s advisers portrayed the decree as an attempt to cut through the deadlock that has stalled Egypt’s convoluted political transition more than 20 months after President Mubarak’s ouster. Mr. Morsi’s more political opponents and the holdover judicial system, they argued, were sabotaging the transition to thwart the Islamist majority.

The liberal and secular opposition has repeatedly threatened to boycott the Islamist-dominated constitutional assembly. (It is led by Mr. Morsi’s allies in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Members were picked by Parliament, where Islamists won a nearly three-quarters majority.) And as the assembly nears a deadline set under an earlier interim transition plan, most secular members and the representatives of the Coptic Church have walked out, costing it up to a quarter of its 100 members and much of its legitimacy.

Finally, Fuad Ajami of the WSJ summed it up on the BBC TV news with: "one election for one leader for one time, the same old Egyptian rule [in both senses of the word] for centuries."

Here's the way the NYT article sums it up:

Mr. Morsi also replaced the public prosecutor, Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, a Mubarak appointee widely criticized for failing to win stronger sentences against Mr. Mubarak and his associates, and against abusive police officers. (Mr. Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison for overseeing the killing of protesters, but the verdict found no direct evidence of his involvement, paving the way for an appeal.)

Mr. Mahmoud’s replacement is Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, former leader of the movement for judicial independence under Mr. Mubarak.

Mr. Morsi ordered retrials for Mr. Mubarak and others accused of responsibility for killing civilian protesters during the uprising. He stripped the accused of protections against being tried twice for the same crime and issued a law setting up a new transitional legal system to handle the retrials.

Another decree provision granted the president the “power to take all necessary measures and procedures” against any potential threat to the revolution.

On the Web site of the state newspaper Al Ahram, a prominent jurist, Salah Eissa, urged citizens “to take to the street and die, because Egypt is lost,” adding, “immunizing the decisions of the president with a constitutional declaration is a forgery and a fraud.”

Nathan J. Brown, a scholar of the Egyptian legal system at George Washington University, summed up the overall message: “I, Morsi, am all powerful. And in my first act as being all powerful, I declare myself more powerful still. But don’t worry — it’s just for a little while.”

The New Pharaoh setting up kangaroo courts in a country being taken over by Islamist crazies. Watch for the "Honor Code" killing daughters get legitimized. And the Copts get persecuted. It's The Alexandria Quartet by Larry Durrell, where the desert creeps in during the last book bringing back the dread sterility of the Arab Middle Ages, where the Fatimids were the high point of Egypt's sad history. And the mad Sultan in 1015 burnt down Churches and Synagogues in his purity of religion---bringing all sorts of insanity into the Arab world. P.S.: The Fatimids were Shi'ites and spawned the Alawites and the Druzis.