Neocons already trying to take credit for the revolutions happening in the Middle East

Well that was quick. I don't think I've ever made an accurate prediction before. Go on, tell me how awesome I am. Eleven days ago, before Egypt, when Tunisia was still the only country rebelling, I said like a boss:

Mark my words, if this unrest escalates, and the idea of democracy becomes more popular throughout the Arab world, neocons will ignore the real reasons why it's happening, and instead point at Iraq. Bush sympathizers have been telling us for years to wait for history to judge him, as if they're expecting the entire middle east to look towards Iraq and succumb to democracy on their own. They're going to go back to the Vietnam-era "domino effect", and say it's all because George W. Bush showed the poor savages what democracy is."

Well, Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser for the Bush administration, has fulfilled prophecy. Read it and weep. Literally. I'm weeping right now. Why would anyone say things like this? Why do such mind-numbingly stupid people exist?

Egypt protests show George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab world

For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their "freedom deficit" signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies. In November 2003, President George W. Bush laid out this question:

"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?"

The massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia that inspired those events, have affirmed that the answer is no and are exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism. Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections. The Arab world may not be swept with a broad wave of revolts now, but neither will it soon forget this moment.

So a new set of questions becomes critical. What lesson will Arab regimes learn? Will they undertake the steady reforms that may bring peaceful change, or will they conclude that exiled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali erred only by failing to shoot and club enough demonstrators? And will our own government learn that dictatorships are never truly stable? For beneath the calm surface enforced by myriad security forces, the pressure for change only grows - and it may grow in extreme and violent forms when real debate and political competition are denied.

[...summarizes the situation...]

All these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological and meant essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush's support for the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was defending self-government, not the use of force. Consider what Bush said in that 2003 speech, which marked the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, an institution established by President Ronald Reagan precisely to support the expansion of freedom.

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."

This spirit did not always animate U.S. diplomacy in the Bush administration; plenty of officials found it unrealistic and had to be prodded or overruled to follow the president's lead. But the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right - and that the Obama administration's abandonment of this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy.

U.S. officials talked to Mubarak plenty in 2009 and 2010, and even talked to the far more repressive President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but they talked about their goals for Israeli-Palestinian peace and ignored the police states outside the doors of those presidential palaces. When the Iranian regime stole the June 2009 elections and people went to the streets, the Obama administration feared that speaking out in their support might jeopardize the nuclear negotiations. The "reset" sought with Russia has been with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, not the Russian people suffering his increasingly despotic and lawless rule.

This has been the greatest failure of policy and imagination in the administration's approach: Looking at the world map, it sees states and their rulers, but has forgotten the millions of people suffering under and beginning to rebel against those rulers. "Engagement" has not been the problem, but rather the administration's insistence on engaging with regimes rather than with the people trying to survive under them.

If the Arab regimes learn the wrong lessons and turn once again to their police and their armies, the U.S. reaction becomes even more important. President Obama's words of support for both the demonstrators and the government late Friday, after speaking with Mubarak, were too little, too late. He said Mubarak had called for "a better democracy" in Egypt, but Obama's remarks did not clearly demand democracy or free elections there. We cannot deliver democracy to the Arab states, but we can make our principles and our policies clear. Now is the time to say that the peoples of the Middle East are not "beyond the reach of liberty" and that we will assist any peaceful effort to achieve it - and oppose and condemn efforts to suppress it.

Such a statement would not elevate our ideals at the expense of our interests. It turns out, as those demonstrators are telling us, that supporting freedom is the best policy of all.

"All these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological..."

Are you shitting me? Does he not know about that one little time Obama visited Cairo and spoke to the entire Muslim world?

"I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

There is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people."

Sorry, B-Rock. According to Elliott Abrams, you never gave that monumental speech.

Granted, my prophecy wasn't entirely fulfilled. He didn't mention Iraq a whole lot specifically, and instead focused more on the "BUSH LIKES FREEDOM AND OBAMA DOESN'T" idea. Of course, that's why half of all conservatives right now are freaking out over what actual Egyptian freedom would look like -- that of the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious, nonviolent, political party, potentially gaining the support of the Egyptian people after Mubarak falls. When it serves their interests, Republicans love freedom!

And the saddest part of all? This is going to work. Neocons are great at rewriting history. They've already convinced their supporters that Republicans founded America. World War II of course fixed the Great Depression, and the New Deal had nothing to do with it. Ronald Reagan single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union, and he personally tore down the Berlin Wall brick by commie brick. A couple years ago I asked a German coworker at camp her opinions on the fall of the wall. She's lived in Germany for her entire life. She'd never heard of Ronald Reagan.

I'm not trying to undermine all the freedoms that Iraq has gained because of George Bush. Iraqis have their democracy. It's a good democracy, and it works, and I'm extremely happy for them. But 109,000 innocent civilians died in order to achieve it. That's not combatants. That's every day people, just like you and me. That's 9/11, thirty-six times over. And this is the lowest estimate. Other estimates range wildly from 150,000 to 600,000 to over a million deaths. How many Egyptians have died for their revolution? About a hundred, give or take. I hate playing numbers games with human lives, but it's really hard to ignore when the difference is so drastic. And I'm not claiming speak on behalf of the Iraqi people on whether they're happy about their new government or not, because they don't speak as one universal voice. Their opinions are extremely divided about it. My point is that Bush's method of achieving freedom in the Middle East is invading nations and stealing their oil at the cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. That's not how you establish democracies. Democracies happen when people rise up for themselves to fight their own battles, to form their own governments, the way they choose. Like how America did it.

Sunday Youtube Post

Protests around the Arab world dramatically escalate

Edit: 32 are dead and at least 1,032 are injured in yesterday's protests in Egypt.

Well, the world media once again shows its glaring incompetence by jumping onto the most important story of the last several years, a month late. This is why the internet is my news source. A lot has happened today. It's like five in the morning in Egypt right now, but this video is from Egypt's "yesterday."



The protests continued well into the night. I think they might still be going on, but if not, they've only died down within last couple hours. Yemen, Algeria, Albania, and Jordon have all joined Egypt and Tunisia in revolt. In Algeria alone, at least eight people set themselves on fire, A a pro-democratic tidal wave is going on in the Arab world, and nothing is going to stop it. It's safe to say that the Egyptian government right now is on the brink of collapse. The president's wife has fled the country, as well as much of the wealthy and upper class on their private jets. Reports were saying that some police were refusing to fire tear gas at the protesters. The headquarters of the ruling party has been burned down. At least five people were killed. The president said that the government is being disbanded, and a new one will be established tomorrow. He's still the president. He's reshuffled the cabinet to appease his people before, and reforms never happened. The protesters aren't going away.

The military was called out around midnight I think (Egypt time), but instead of fighting against the protesters, they decided to protect them. From what I've been hearing, the Egyptian people have a tremendous amount of respect for their military, and they were looking forward to the armed forces being called out to the streets. It's the police that the government tightly controls. And the people certainly had reason to be happy about the army's arrival: after all these reports of police beatings and shootings, it's been confirmed that the military and the police have been shooting at each other. When I was watching the live feed of Al Jazeera English earlier, I saw protesters cheering as military vehicles were driving by. A lot of people are on edge about what's going to happen tomorrow if the protesters have to stand up against a military that does not want to stand against them either. Or they may not stand against each other at all.

In an utterly beautiful display of restraint and sanity among all the chaos, a large group of protesters at one point lined up outside the national museum--which houses relics thousands of years old--to protect it from being looted. The military took over for them after their arrival. I WANT PICTURES.

Egypt is one of America's most important allies. It's also rated as one of least democratic governments in the world. In a disgusting and embarrassing display of hypocrisy, the western world - a world founded on freedom and liberty - refuses to take sides when a people are fighting and dying for human rights. Nearly every comment from every government I've heard today is "well we like the protesters, but we also like the government, tee hee!" We give $1.5 billion dollars to the Egyptian government every year. Here's a tear gas can with "Made in U.S.A." printed on it.



Egypt shut down the entire internet yesterday. Nobody can make cell phone calls either. People are being shot. Joe Biden said yesterday that President Mubarak is not a dictator, and he should not step down.

President Obama spoke about today's events, and gave a slightly saner analysis than Joe Biden. He spoke with Mubarak shortly after his announcement about disbanding the government, and urged him to lift the restraints on the internet and cell phone use. He said that reforms are necessary, and that he is willing to work with both the Egyptian government and the Egyptian people in order to achieve them. I don't really know why he's willing to work with a government that shoots its people in the streets.



An Egyptian blogger made it quite clear that the west needs to stay the fuck out of this:

"We don't expect anything from Obama, whom we regard as a great hypocrite. But we hope and expect the American people – trade unions, professors' associations, student unions, activist groups, to come out in support of us. What we want for the US government is to completely get out of the picture. We don't want any sort of backing; just cut aid to Mubarak immediately and withdraw backing from him, withdraw from all Middle Eastern bases, and stop supporting the state of Israel. Ultimately, Mubarak will do whatever he has to do to protect himself. He will suddenly adopt the most anti-US rhetoric if he thought that would help him save his skin. At the end of the day he's committed to his own interests, and if he thinks the US won't support him, he'll turn somewhere else. The reality is that any really clean government that comes to power in the region will come into open conflict with the US because it will call for radical redistribution of wealth and ending support for Israel or other dictatorships. So we don't expect any help from America, just to leave us alone."

Nobel laureate Mohammed Elbaradei, an Egyptian opposition leader who joined in the protests in Cairo, said this:

"The Egyptian people will take care of themselves. The Egyptian people will be the ones who will make the change. We are not waiting for help or assistance from the outside world, but what I expect from the outside world is to practice what you preach, is to defend the rights of the Egyptian to their universal values."

I'm very worried about what could be the political outcome of all this. One of the reasons why the American revolution was so successful was because we were completely isolated from the rest of the world. The founders made it quite clear after they won that they wanted nothing to do with the massive clusterfuck that was European politics. In contrast, look at the French revolution. The French revolted only a few years after we did. What happened? Being in such close proximity to all the European powers, the vultures immediately swooped in and tried to take advantage of the huge gaping hole in the power structure of Europe. You had all these political shifts in France going back and forth, and thousands of people were needlessly executed. Then Napoleon assumed control, and depending on which historian you ask, he either marched through Europe in a bloody trail of conquest, or gloriously defended the interests of the French people from the prying monarchical clutches of the rest of Europe. Outside influences fuck revolutions, and they are going to happen in the Middle East very soon.

And already we're seeing Iran shove its fucking nose into this. Iranian newspapers closely tied to the government are coming out strongly in support of the protesters. There's the very real possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood moving in and taking over. There are two ways this could realistically tip: either in the direction of a democratic tidal wave, or a new Islamist Empire, circa the 7th and 8th centuries. Judging by the fact that these protesters are asking for more civil rights, I'm hopeful that they're not going to fall for bullshit anymore.

It's a little hard to believe that a single man sparked all of this. This is all happening because of Tunisia.

Favorite Albums of 2010

A little late to the "Let's review the year!" party, but whatev. In no particular order. Ninja edit: Actually that's sort of a lie, Go is probably my favorite 2010 release.

Jónsi - Go





Gorillaz - Plastic Beach





The Black Keys - Brothers





The Ascent of Everest - From This Vantage





Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy





Trampled By Turtles - Palomino





El Trío de Omar Rodríguez-López - Ciencia de los Inútiles

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S TELEPROMPTER IS GONNA STEAL THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Barack Obama's state of the union address tonight was moderate, sane, and not partisan in any way. Much of it was a rally to come to together. It was the same message he's been repeating ever since he was thrust onto the national stage. Republicans responded to it by continuing to be the most blatantly partisan and idiotic shitbags they can possibly be. These people are taken seriously by half the country.

For some reason, Republicans felt it necessary to respond to the president's state of the union tonight twice. One response was from the actual Republican party, and the other was from the Republicans again, but as the Tea Party I guess. Because they're two separate entities, you know! The Tea Party hates both parties, tee hee!

Here's the Tea Party's response. You can watch it if you really want to. In it, Michelle Bachman literally compared Republicans fighting against Barack Obama to American soldiers who fought the Japanese on Iwo Jima. Obamacare is cutting fetuses out of pregnant women and impaling them on bayonets! How's all that hopey changey stuff working out for you, America?



On the chart she introduces at 1:15, the numbers she attributes to Barack Obama were actually the results of the Bush Administration. She blamed the FY 2009 deficit on Obama. I'm glad we can all agree that Republican policies fuck the country.

She also said unemployment "spiked" and the stimulus "failed." Here, I have charts too.





Tonight, Barack Obama made a goal for the United States to be run on 80% clean energy by 2035, strongly emphasized K-12 education, and vowed to crack down on corporate tax code loopholes. I don't know if any of that will happen, but I'm going to go with the guy who tells me how great America can be, rather than the party who lies right to my fucking face. I'm not the sharpest knife, but I'm certainly not dumb, and I don't appreciate being treated like it. Fuck these people.

Stephen Colbert Rejects Keith Olbermann's Powers

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Tunisia Update

The Tunisian Prime Minister, an ally of the former president, has vowed to step down and leave politics forever after the elections in a few months. Things are looking good for the Tunisian people right now, but there's still a lot of reasons to be cautious. I'll just quote from Al Jazeera:

Indeed, the problem with most post-colonial nationalisms - whether that of the first generation of independence leaders or of the leaders who replaced (often by overthrowing) them - is precisely that they have always remained infected with the virus of greed, corruption and violence so entrenched by decades of European colonial rule. Tunisia's nascent revolution will only succeed if it can finally repair the damage caused by French rule and the post-independence regime that in so many ways continued to serve European and American - rather than Tunisian - interests.

The stakes could not be higher. The "Tunisian Scenario" could lead either to a greater democratic opening across the Arab world, or it could lead to the situation in Algeria in the early 1990s, where democratisation was abruptly halted and the country plunged into civil war when it seemed that an Islamist government might come to power. We can be sure that leaders across the Arab world are busy planning how to stymie any attempts by their people to emulate the actions of Tunisia's brave citizenry.

And to top it all off, protests inspired by Tunisia have now erupted all across Egypt.

CAIRO — Thousands of people calling for the end of the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak clashed with riot police in this Egyptian capital on Tuesday, on a day of some of the most serious civil unrest in recent memory here.

The protesters, mobilized largely on the Internet and energized by recent events in Tunisia, occupied one of the city’s most famous squares for hours, beating back police assaults with tear gas and water cannons.

“Freedom, freedom, freedom,” they chanted. “Where are the Egyptian people?”

Security officials said several thousand people demonstrated in Alexandria, and there were also reports of large demonstrations in other cities, including Mansoura and Mahalla al-Kobra. There a video posted on the Internet showed people tearing up a large portrait of Mr. Mubarak — an act whose boldness here is hard to overstate.

State television made no mention of the protests, and sporadically through the afternoon, cellphone networks were interrupted or unavailable.

There was no immediate count of arrests or injuries, but the clashes in Cairo left dozens of people bleeding in Tahrir Square, one of Cairo’s best-known settings, near the Egyptian Museum and a Ritz-Carlton Hotel under construction. Tourists gawked, and older protesters said they had never seen anything like the defiant demonstration.

Just blocks away, in sharp contrast, calm prevailed and traffic was light for Police Day, the national holiday the protesters co-opted for their campaign against the government.

Mohammed Ashraf, a 22-year-old law student, said the blood drenching his white sweater was from a police officer. Like other protesters, he echoed the deep-seated frustrations of an enduring, repressive government that drove Tunisians to revolt:: rampant corruption, injustice, high unemployment and the simple lack of dignity accorded them by the state.

“Our government is unjust,” Mr. Ashraf said. “I’m not happy. The state is very aggressive with people.”

At least six young Egyptians have set themselves on fire in recent weeks, in an imitation of the self-immolation that set off the Tunisian unrest. Egypt has forbidden gas stations to sell to people not in cars and placed security agents wielding fire extinguishers outside government offices.

[...]

The marchers included young people documenting the clashes with cellphone cameras and middle-aged people carrying flags of the Wafd party, one of Egypt’s opposition groups. A young doctor, Wissam Abdulaziz, said she had traveled two hours to join the protest. She had been to one protest before, after the police were accused of fatally beating a young man in Alexandria named Khaled Said to death last year.

“I came to change the government,” she said. “I came to change the entire regime.”

Rush Limbaugh: Liberals should be "silenced" and "not be allowed to buy guns"

Crosspost from tumblr. Here's the transcript. Rush and a caller also say that the Tucson shooter is a "liberal," which is hilarious enough, but then it took a turn for the terrifying.

"I’ve got the solution to all this. I’ve got the solution to most crime in America. From this day forward, somebody propose it, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns. It’s just that simple. Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns. I mean if we want to get serious about this, if we want to face this head on, we’re gonna have to openly admit, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns, nor should they be allowed to use computer keyboards or typewriters, word processors or e-mails, and they should have their speech controlled. If we did those three or four things, I can’t tell you what a sane, calm, civil, fun-loving society we would have. Take guns out of the possession, out of the hands of liberals, take their typewriters and their keyboards away from ‘em, don’t let ‘em anywhere near a gun, and control their speech. You would wipe out 90% of the crime, 85 to 95% of the hate, and a hundred percent of the lies from society."

Well, here it is. With the Republican Party trailing further and further right every day, one of them finally went full on fascist and proposed that all opposition should be silenced, and their means of fighting back taken away. If he was trying to discourage me from potential gun ownership, then it had the exact opposite effect. Now my urge to own a gun is stronger than ever.