Egyptian Uprising: Latest Updates

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An Associated Press video report on Saturday’s developments:

The New York Times:

As street battles between protesters and the security police flared for a fifth day, Mr. Mubarak named a new government filled with military figures, signaling the pivotal role the military might play in shaping the outcome of the unrest. He appointed Omar Suleiman, his right-hand man and the country’s intelligence chief, as vice president and a retired general as prime minister.

Reuters thumbnail biography of Suleiman:

* He has been the director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services (EGIS) since 1993, a role in which he has played a prominent public role in diplomacy, including in Egypt’s relations with Israel and with key aid donor the United States.
* He was born on July 2, 1936 in Qena, in southern Egypt. He later enrolled in Egypt’s premier Military Academy in 1954, after which he received additional military training in the then Soviet Union at Moscow’s Frunze Military Academy.
* He also studied political science at Cairo University and Ain Shams University. In 1992 he headed the General Operations Authority in the Armed Forces and then became the director of the military intelligence unit before taking over EGIS.
* Suleiman took part in the war in Yemen in 1962 and the 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel.
* As Egypt’s intelligence chief, Suleiman was in charge of the country’s most important political security files, and was the mastermind behind the fragmentation of Islamist groups who led the uprising against the state in the 1990s.

Obama met Saturday afternoon with his top advisers and issued a statement repeating what he said Friday about “opposing violence and calling for restraint, supporting universal rights,” et cetera.

Protesters outside the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, D.C.:

Allapundit compiled a massive aggregation today, his latest update being a report that a “senior administration official” says the U.S. wants “managed change.” Don’t expect that to pacify the protesters.

UPDATE: Stanley Kurtz sees tribalism asserting itself in the streets of Cairo. On a more encouraging note — indeed, the only encouraging thing about Egypt I’ve seen all day — John Guardiano of the American Spectator predicts the Egyptian army will prevent an Islamic revolution:

[W]hile Islamist elements may well try to take advantage of the Egyptian revolution, they face one almost insurmountable obstacle: the Egyptian military, a professional force and a nationally respected institution which views itself as the guardians of greater Egypt.
Indeed, the Egyptian military is not dominated by Islamists; and it will not allow Egypt to descend into total anarchy.
In fact, the Egyptian military will play a major role in Egypt’s next government, just as it has ever since the Mamluks of the Middle Ages. . . .

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE II: Ed Driscoll rounds up the optimists-vs.-pessimists debate among conservative pundits, with Max Boot in a mood of neocon triumphalism and Stanley Kurtz the realpolitik pessimist. Of course, I lean toward pessimism, if only because optimism is an invitation to disappointment. I can’t help but wonder if Kurtz’s pessimism is a tribute to his literary namesake: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

UPDATE III: The European powers call for “free and fair elections”:

“It is essential that the further political, economic and social reforms President Mubarak has promised are implemented fully and quickly, and meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people,” said a joint statement issued by British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“The Egyptian people have … a longing for a just and better future,” the statement continued. “We urge President Mubarak to embark on a process of transformation, which should be reflected in a broad-based government and in free and fair elections.”

UPDATE IV: Donald Douglas is clearly in the neocon optimist camp and cites a Wall Street Journal editorial that I’m not sure makes his point:

Our stake in Egypt is not in any one ruler but in a transition from dictatorship to a more stable representative government that can better meet the aspirations of Egyptians.

See, my concern is that the “aspirations of Egyptians” might include such agenda items as “Death to the Zionist entity!” and “Down with the Great Satan!” Perhaps I remember 1979 too well.

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Like Egypt, Charlie Sheen’s Problems Have Finally Reached Crisis Stage

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His hookers-and-blow lifestyle has at last become too much even for Charlie.

The Hosni Mubarak of Hollywood bad boys has entered rehab and CBS says Two-and-a-Half Men is “on hiatus.”

Anyone familiar with bipolar disorder would recognize Sheen’s symptoms: He cut a $30,000 check to a porn star Wednesday as a sort of down payment on her joining the “porn family” he was planning:

During the boozefest, Charlie agreed to rent out George’s giant estate for four months — at the rate of $250k per month — while George goes away on an upcoming trip to Thailand.
And why does Sheen need an extra mansion? Charlie explained that he wants to start a “porn family” — and he wants the “actresses” to all live in the same house.

What luck for 22-year-old porn star Kacey Jordan to encounter a millionaire in the midst of a manic episode, huh? TMZ has video of Kacey describing her evening with Charlie Sheen (which I link just so you don’t succumb to the temptation of Googling “Kacey Jordan video”). TMZ calls her a “high-end porn star,” because you wouldn’t want to think the star of a CBS prime-time hit show was partying with low-end porn stars, would you?

How out of control did Charlie get? Lindsay Lohan was worried about him.

Also worried about him: Ex-wife Denise Richards. Can you imagine her trying to explain this to their kids? “No, Daddy won’t be taking you to Chuck E. Cheese this weekend, because he’s too busy snorting up a briefcase full of coke with some porn stars.”

Personally, I think Charlie should have been institutionalized the minute he split with Denise. Letting her get away? Obviously, he was crazy.

So now Charlie’s in rehab and porn star Kacey is lawyered up, which means no more really fun Hollywood news for while.

Oh, wait, no — Demi Lovato just got out of rehab.

Maybe the fun has just begun.

Egypt: ‘Attaboy, Mubarak’?

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“The position of the government of the United States of America should never be to say to the side that’s using batons on demonstrators, ‘attaboy.’”
— Jim Geraghty, National Review

Oh, I don’t know, Jim. When it came to student protesters in Berkeley and rioters in Watts, wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s election as California governor basically a result of the voters saying “attaboy”?

Grant that Hosni Mubarak isn’t UC President Clark Kerr and that Egyptians in 2011 have grievances more serious than did the residents of Watts in 1965. Still, the question isn’t merely who is wielding batons, but against whom the batons are being wielded.

I remember seeing the Denver police in riot gear at the Democratic convention in 2008 and thinking, “Man, I hope the anarchist scum try to start trouble with these guys.”

So if I didn’t mind the Denver police putting some well-deserved whup-ass on smelly American peaceniks, why should I object to Cairo police putting some whup-ass on the Muslim Brotherhood?

Because he’s a member of Congress, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Awesome) can’t put in quite such blunt terms:

Though many will be tempted to superficially interpret the Egyptian demonstrations as an uprising for populist democracy, they must recall how such similar initial views of the 1979 Iranian Revolution were belied by the mullahs’ radical jackbooted murderers, who remain bent upon grasping regional hegemony and nuclear weaponry.

American idealism about democracy and free speech and peaceable assembly doesn’t necessarily match the situation on the ground in Cairo and, in the absence of knowledge about what a post-Mubarak Egypt would look like, we ought not let our enthusiasm outrun the facts. As it is, the facts don’t look good for Mubarak:

Egypt was engulfed in a fifth day of protests on Saturday but an attempt by President Hosni Mubarak to salvage his 30-year rule by firing his cabinet and calling out the army appeared to backfire as troops and demonstrators fraternized and called for the president himself to resign. . . .
The feared security police had largely withdrawn from central Cairo to take up positions around the presidential palace . . .
Following Mr. Mubarak’s demand in his late-night speech, the Egyptian cabinet officially resigned on Saturday. But there was no sign of letup in the tumult. Reports from morgues and hospitals suggested that at least 50 people had been killed so far.

UPDATE: A former adviser to the Obama administration argues that the Muslim Brotherhood “should not be seen as inevitably our enemy” — which is what you’d expect an Obama adviser to say, I suppose — but Thomas Joscelyn isn’t buying it:

Hosni Mubarak’s regime is no friend of freedom, even though it is certainly an ally against al Qaeda.
In all likelihood, an Egypt dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood (if that is how the turmoil plays out) would be neither.

And not to justify the Zeitgeist conspiracy-mongers murmuring about “international bankers,” but Larry Kudlow suggests that Ben Bernanke’s “quantitative easing” policy at the Fed might be implicated in the Egyptian unrest:

Commodities are priced in dollars, and the Fed has been overproducing dollars for more than two years. Consequently, emerging markets throughout the world — and the food sector in particular — are suffering from rising inflation.

UPDATE II: President Obama’s official remarks last night:

The speech left “lots of people complaining bitterly that [Obama] had endorsed Mubarak’s grim struggle to hold on to power, missed an historic opportunity, and risked sparking a wave of anti-Americanism,” says GWU Professor Marc Lynch, adding: “The administration, it seems to me, is trying hard to protect the protestors from an escalation of violent repression, giving Mubarak just enough rope to hang himself, while carefully preparing to ensure that a transition will go in the direction of a more democratic successor.”

Well, Professor Lynch is an expert and I am not, but I would say that in general, previous optimism about the Obama administration has inevitably led to disappointment. Even in a situation like this — where the U.S. seems confronted by a choice between “bad” and “worse” — my hunch is that whatever Obama does will turn out to be disastrous.

UPDATE III: Carolyn Glick of the Jerusalem Post is not sanguine about what the Egyptian unrest means for Israel. Her pessimism points toward the basic problem with those who talk hopefully about “Mideast peace,” namely the fact that the Arab/Muslim world has been steeped in anti-Israel hatred for so long that Israel’s choices come down to either fighting against radicals or negotiating with “moderates” who don’t really represent anyone.

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Who Will Be the Bob Dole of 2012?

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Smitty in the Kabul bureau thought this exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn was worth sharing:

Hugh Hewitt: Oh, that brings me, though, to the NBC dictate, that they will run the first Republican debate at the Reagan Library on May 2nd, along with Politico. It will be hosted by Brian Williams. They just told people to show up. And you know, I’ve got to assume that Brian Williams and Chris Matthews talk a little bit. Why in the world would we allow, Mark Steyn, the conservative movement, to allow the MSM to mediate these debates?
Mark Steyn: Oh, come on, Hugh. I mean, I think Brian Williams is the perfect man to moderate the debate, and determine who is going to be this year’s Bob Dole or John McCain. We’re interested, I think in this political season, we need to identify as early as possible the decent, dignified Republican loser who knows how to give a great concession speech. And I think that’s what Brian Williams and NBC are hoping to get a jump on. And now if you’re actually interested in saving this country from sliding into a multi-trillion dollar abyss, then letting Brian Williams dictate your nominating process is a complete waste of time. But I’m not sure the Republican party at heart quite gets that yet.

Obviously, Mr. Steyn is indulging in a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor there, but indeed that’s the way the Republican Party seems to operate.

‘Whose Bright Idea Was It to Send Joe Biden Out to Talk About Egypt?’

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Question of the day, asked by Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy in response to the latest eruption of Bidenism.

“Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden responded: ‘Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with — with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.’ “

Remember how in 2008 we were told that Biden was such a brilliant choice as running mate and that Obama would benefit enormously from this guy’s vast experience in foreign policy?

“I can see Cairo from my house!”

Tobin Harshaw at the New York Times rounds up a number of blog reactions to the Egyptian situation, including Donald Douglas at American Power saying “this administration is the unrivaled champion of reactionary forces in the Middle East.” In regard to Egypt, I’m not entirely sure that “reactionary forces” are the worst to be feared, or whether the protesters in the streets are less “reactionary” than Mubarak’s regime. Thursday night, I voiced a note of Burkean caution toward the incipient Egyptian revolution, which will not help anyone — not the Egyptians, not the cause of Middle East peace, and certainly not the United States — if it ends up empowering Islamist radicals.

Israel reportedly is worried about “regime change” in Egypt, and I think rightly so. Yet what is better for Israel: A corrupt authoritarian regime in Egypt constantly struggling to suppress an outlaw terrorist subculture or that terrorist subculture seizing power in Egypt and declaring itself an open enemy of Israel? I trust if the latter scenario were to play out, the Israeli military would prove itself abundantly capable of meeting any attack that an Islamist Egyptian regime might make. So having the Egyptian radicals seize power might actually make matters simpler for Israel, militarily and diplomatically.

Meanwhile, much of the media commentary is less focused on what the unrest in Cairo means for Egyptians or Israelis than what it means for the prestige of the Obama administration. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” et cetera, and the administration’s sycophants in the press corps — which is to say, just about the entire press corps — seem to be interested primarily in whether the Egyptian crisis will offer them the opportunity to credit the president with a foreign-policy success.

The administration, it appears, is trying to have it both ways so as to be able to claim victory whether Mubarak maintains power or is overthrown. Thus the facing-both-ways caution of Robert Gibbs’s Friday press conference. As I said on Twitter, “If this was 1939, Gibbs would condemn violence on both sides of Germany-Poland conflict.”

UPDATE: Sharif Mansour says Friday’s protests demonstrate that Mubarak is doomed:

If the administration is smart, it will see the writing on the wall and realize that the old order in Egypt, and conceivably the rest of the Middle East, is gone forever. When the smoke clears, Washington will want to be on the right side of history. The United States must now withdraw its support, both financial and symbolic, from the Mubarak regime and avoid any further ties to its oppression.

Arguments based on being “on the right side of history” don’t necessarily persuade a Burkean. Weren’t the Soviets supposed to be “on the right side of history”?

Does the situation in Egypt evoke the distinctions Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously made in “Dictatorships & Double Standards”? If, as we are told, radical Islam is an existential threat comparable to Soviet communism, and if Mubarak has been a valuable U.S. ally in the fight against radicaL Islam, is it not in our interest to support him? But those two “ifs” represent hypotheticals that I don’t have the expertise to address.

What is certain is that the administration cannot vacillate forever. It must either decide to support Mubarak or else decide to support the Egyptian uprising. Eliot Abrams sees the uprising as vindication of Bush’s advocacy of democracy in the Middle East:

Ruling under an endless emergency law, [Mubarak] has crushed the moderate opposition while the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has thrived underground and in the mosques. Mubarak in effect created a two-party system – his ruling National Democratic Party and the Brotherhood – and then defended the lack of democracy by saying a free election would bring the Islamists to power. . . .
[W]e do know for sure that regimes that make moderate politics impossible make extremism far more likely.

Abrams thus argues that it is Mubarak’s repression that has spurred the growth of jihadist radicalism in Egypt, which may well be true, but that doesn’t mean that ending the repression will eliminate the danger. Nevertheless, if Republicans like Abrams are making the argument against Mubarak, that makes Obama’s choice easier: Side with the Cairo protesters and tout this stance as an example of bipartisan consensus.

Of course, the “bipartisan consensus” will only last as long as the policy is successful. If Obama throws Mubarak under the bus and then Egypt descends into anarchy Somalia-style, the president won’t escape blame by saying, “But Eliot Abrams told me it was OK!”

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE III: Thanks to Reaganite Republicanan for calling attention to this interview with John Bolton: “It is not inevitable that street demonstrations lead to Jeffersonian democracy.”

UPDATE IV: The Lonely Conservative notes that Iran’s state-run media are celebrating the Egyptian uprising, a fact that would tend to reinforce Bolton’s concerns. If the mullahs in Tehran think these Cairo riots are a good idea . . .

UPDATE V: Allahpundit on the risk that democracy in Egypt might bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power: “After 9/11 and the Iranian revolution in ’79, how could any American president gamble on backing reforms that might produce a net outcome that’s more Islamist? It’s political suicide.”

Linked by Don Surber, who calls Biden “a dunderhead who cannot tell a dictator from Tater Tot,” and now a Memeorandum thread.

A Keith Olbermann ‘Sir’-Mon

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“During the run of the show, Olbermann delivered about 65 ‘Special Comments’ . . . Announced in advance, and written by Olbermann himself, each consisted of a bellowing, pseudo-intellectual rant peppered with historical references, quotes and dripping with excessive adverbs and moral vanity.
“The oft-parodied format . . . is most recognized for its generous use of the indignant salutation, ‘You, sir!’ which Olbermann used an impressive 173 times, according to transcripts, an average of almost three per essay. Olbermann usually used the words to address President Bush or Dick Cheney, in anger. The number of ‘sirs’ per comment is a pretty good gauge of the rage Olbermann felt toward a particular figure.”
— Mary Katharine Ham, The Daily Caller

Via Instapundit.

‘Civility,’ Unless It’s Sarah Palin

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“Yo, let me tell you something about Sarah Palin, man. She’s good masturbation material. Glasses and all of that — great masturbation material.”
— Tracy Morgan, TNT, Inside the NBA

You can’t make this stuff up, nor can you explain it. At Salon.com, Ethan Sherwood Strauss flounders around with an attempted intellectualization:

It takes a certain social judgment to grasp that our TV mores accept the vague objectification of famous women, but not the explicit stating of how this objectification manifests. Of course, Tracy might have known better, and cared less.
In non-televised life, I’ve heard many guys say exactly what Morgan said. And it’s undeniable that Palin is fetishized in conservative circles and that this fetishization gives her a certain political cachet. But, we’re a Puritanical culture, replete with public euphemisms. We also have modern gender sensitivities that I wouldn’t dismiss as mere “political correctness.”

This completely misses the point, although I must confess to being somewhat shocked to hear a writer for Salon proclaim that among his acquaintances it is commonplace to “say exactly what Morgan said.”

No, Mr. Strauss, what happened here was not about “the vague objectification of famous women,” nor was it about our “Puritanical culture” or “modern gender sensitivities.” Rather, what happened is the result of Tracy Morgan correctly reading signals from the liberal commissars of pop culture who have decided that Sarah Palin is the demonized Other, about whom it is permissible to say anything at all, except praise.

Remember when a reporter moved in next door to the Palin family and no liberal objected? Remember when Palin was blamed for the Tucson shooting and no liberal objected? Remember when Janeane Garofalo called Palin “small-minded and mean-spirited“? Remember what Kathy Griffin said about how Palin got the 2008 vice-presidential nomination? “That must have been some blow job.”

Liberals never raised any objections to any of that, because they fear Palin as a threat to Obama’s popularity. Sarah Palin has been made a latter-day Emmanuel Goldstein, except that her “Two-Minute Hate” has lasted more than two years.

Of course, TNT makes the perfunctory apology, but all of Tracy Morgan’s show-business friends will high-five him for those remarks. He will not lose any work as a result. He will not be made a pariah. The demonization of Sarah Palin has been made entirely acceptable by liberalism’s culture commissars, who declared open season on her in August 2008.

And yet they consider themselves the proper persons to lecture the rest of us about “civility.”