The Fox News reporter, speaking from Cairo half an hour ago, did not receive the right-wing-media talking points. Back in the New York studio, a Fox blonde had been skeptically quizzing Alan Colmes about all the downsides to Mubarak’s stepping down; the reporter instead excitedly gushed about the unforeseen and rapid triumph of people wanting, as Bush might have put it, to be free. Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, after having spent the last two weeks criticizing whatever it was that the Obama Administration had most recently done towards Egypt—whether supporting regime change (remember that Bushism?) or backing off from regime change (either way, Obama was wrong)—has now lost interest in the story. After a sour prediction that Obama would try to take credit for Mubarak’s concession in his forthcoming speech about the Egyptian revolution, Limbaugh has been concertedly focusing on Obamacare—which is of course his right, it’s just that the sudden change of focus is rather startling.
Expect an outpouring of right-wing bile towards whatever Obama says about Egypt, as if any president wouldn’t want to align himself with what at this moment cannot help but conjure up hopes for greater openness in the Middle East—even if those hopes are ultimately dashed,
I am by no means an unequivocal fan of revolutions; I do not believe that human rights are universal and timeless, rather than the product of evolving and contingent political beliefs. But I could better stomach the right-wing media’s effort to discredit the Egyptian revolution and to portray it as a failure of Obama’s diplomacy if they had not given such unthinking jingoistic support to Bush’s Freedom Agenda, if Sean Hannity’s theme song was not “Let Freedom Ring,” if they didn’t claim a divine mandate to lead the world towards American-style democracy.
“…I could better stomach the right-wing media’s effort to discredit the Egyptian revolution and to portray it as a failure of Obama’s diplomacy if they had not…”
“They”? The way this is written, it sounds as though the writer is self-identifying as left wing. There are ways to criticize your own side without seeming to put so much rhetorical distance between yourself and your side that you come off sounding indistinguishable from a highly partisan opponent of your side. The blog entry here reads like it was written for Daily Kos and accidentally posted here.
For the record, there are and have always been important conservative reasons to doubt the wisdom of George Bush’s program of democratization of the Middle East, and anybody who reads a good amount of conservative commentary is well aware of this. So it’s a bit jarring, to say the least, out of the blue to see the right wing portrayed as gung ho about democratization until just last night. It’s the sort of cheap and poorly informed shot that one expects from the pages of a deeply left wing blog that barely pays any attention to what conservatives are saying and has only a vague notion that conservatives had been uncritically cheering on anything and everything that George Bush does.
That said, there are plenty of important distinctions between Iraq and Afghanistan and Egypt. Long before anyone outside of Texas had ever heard of George W. Bush, Afghanistan was close to North Korea in being infamously oppressive. Everyone knew about the Taliban. And Saddam Hussein was similarly a near-Hitlerian figure. In contrast, very little was said about how oppressive Mubarak had been. Oh, there was repression, and it was reported – for example when prominent bloggers in Egypt were arrested from time to time over the past several years. So, yes, there’s been repression. But at least insofar as it was talked about in the US, it was *vastly* less than the oppression under the Taliban, for example. So an American, based on what he has read, will understandably be much less enthusiastic about Egyptian liberation than he would be about Afghanistan liberation.
On top of this, there has been a great deal of talk on the right about the danger of democratizing a highly Muslim country, including Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been many reports about how Jews and Christians are oppressed in Afghanistan and Iraq. These started well before anybody outside of Illinois had heard of Barack Obama.
I could go on at much greater length, but I’ll cut it short. In short, then, the blog article here seems tremendously one-sided, the author seems innocent of anything but the most cursory familiarity with discussion on the conservosphere, and I don’t really know what this is doing on a blog that titles itself “Secular Right”. One would expect a self-identifying right winger, secular or not, to be at least somewhat familiar with important lines of thinking which have been going on for long before this current situation arose. Anyone even dimly aware of the conservative conversation would recognize the current points being raised as being an unsurprising and straightforward continuation of a long discussion which was well underway since long before most people had heard of Obama.
Well well, right in this very blog, an example of what I was referring to.
http://secularright.org/SR/wordpress/2011/02/03/secular-egyptian-muslims-are-like-christian-reconstructionists/
The contrast seems to be this:
One contributor to this blog is worried about the fate of Egypt should majorities get their way and start executing apostates and stoning adulterers and so on.
Another contributor to this blog is worried about Obama and sees Egypt as a feather in Obama’s cap and is quite distraught that there are so many right wingers who dare to worry about unimportant stuff like executing apostates and stoning adulterers.
“Another contributor to this blog is worried about Obama and sees Egypt as a feather in Obama’s cap”
Respectfully, WTF are you reading? Certainly not Heather’s comments.
Stories like this are rather, uh, revealing–which is what Heather is talking about.
As for you, I guess doubling-down on Egyptian dictators, forever, would have been a strategy of some sort. And when the inevitable collapse happened, and the blowback was something fierce, you could tell us that anyone who pointed out the fruits of this inevitable blowback was “blaming America first” or some other such cliche.
Yes, this subject is revealing indeed.
Wasn’t all of this covered previously by Jeanne Kirkpatrick on the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes?
I’m not a fan of Obama in the least. But I have to give the guy some credit, it’s not as if there are any good alternatives here. It seems like what he’s done is the best one could hope for. Thus far there hasn’t been much by way of violence. Some revolution was inevitable and it seems like thus far it’s going to be an orderly transition. Yes, I really fear fundamentalist Islamic sentiment in the middle east. But honestly those who think the only way to quell this is by imposing strongmen need to ask themselves if they aren’t just avoiding short term problems while making longer term problems worse.
Bush was bad because he had the rhetoric of democracy but was only half heartedly committed to it. He tried to have it both ways which just made things worse.
There’s no perfect or easy solution to the problem that the Middle East, a region of around 400 million people, is in the grips of ignorance, poverty and political fanaticism.
You have to think in short-term, practical terms. Is the next Egyptian government a threat to regional stability? What about Suez, what about Israel? What about terrorist groups? America needs to consider these things ahead of any other consideration.
The stakes are kinda too high to advance the line of reasoning I’ve seen somewhere “let them have democracy even if it means they become Islamist, it’s a stage they have to go through”.
The premise of this post — that the modern conservative movement has any ideology left other than hating Obama with frothing rage — is incorrect. If Bush was president right now, they would say that this was his “Reagan Moment.” Obama’s Cairo speech from June of 2009 called for exactly this sort of velvet revolution, and now it’s taking place. If the conservatives had any integrity left, they’d acknowledge that the Obama Doctrine brought about more peace, with far less dead and far less added to the deficit, than the odious Bush Doctrine. Lets hope the Bush/Rumsfield dress-up warrior mentality will never show up again. Listening to clowns like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich rattle their sabers from the safety of television studio green rooms doesn’t make me hopeful that the right has learned anything from the last ten years at all.
It is always disheartening and disappointing that even on such historic occasions there are those who are unable to turn off their partisanship and are unable to see things beyond the tired right vs left narrative.
While I understand the motivations of Rush, Hannity, Beck, Fox and others in their need to criticize Obama, there are times when the toxic rhetoric is non-productive and it makes us all look petty.
The recent portrayals of the revolution in Egypt as a bad thing or some grand Islamic Caliphate is playing with fire, as it gives ammunition to the Islamic extremists groups who would like nothing more than to turn the events in Egypt into a holy war and an opportunity to seek power.
We need to be on the side of people of Egypt. We should help in our support as much as we can and continue to offer encouragement to help them move towards democracy and free elections. That support and encouragement is vital in the days ahead, as the forces in the Middle East opposing freedom and democracy will prey on those individuals dissatisfied with the slow speed of change.
Mike H.–“let them have democracy”. Uh, exactly how did you envision stopping them? Feel free to volunteer for the next invasion, which can be on your dime, not mine.
Somehow, we managed to survive the Soviets for half a century. I reckon we’ll managed if mighty Egypt goes into the crapper.
I highly doubt an invasion would have been necessary. Anyway, it’s not too late yet. The military can still go with a reliable company man.
“Limbaugh has been concertedly focusing on Obamacare…”
Wherefore “concertedly”? With whom is Limbaugh focusing?
Is it really clear that “The Right” is – as a group – opposed to democracy in Egypt?
Considering how vehemently some conservatives (Like Lawrence Auster, Sean Hannity) are complaining about how SOME CONSERVATIVES (like Bill Krystol) have “sold out Israel” by supporting the Egyptian revolution, it would appear that the right is, if anything, rather split on the issue.
Well it’s the classic split, Realpolitik vs Wilsonian idealism. That will always be the field of tension in American foreign policy.
Unthinking partisanship will always create these inconsistencies. The reflexive left ran into the same problem right before the Iraq War. They opposed Dubya’s invasion of Iraq, but had backed Clinton’s bombing of Serbia, which had even less justification. Of course you can exceptions on the left who either dissented from the Serbian adventure or who backed Dubya (as is the case in Egypt, really), but the cases were analogous.
Yes, the bombing of Serbia which lasted a few weeks, required no ground troops, cost no American lives and was not sold with lies, is exactly analogous to Bush’s Iraq war.