The Fox News reporter, speaking from Cairo half an hour ago, did not receive the right-wing-media talking points.\u00a0 Back in the New York studio, a Fox blonde had been skeptically quizzing Alan Colmes about all the downsides to Mubarak\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, after having spent the last two weeks criticizing whatever it was that the Obama Administration had most recently done towards Egypt\u2014whether supporting regime change (remember that Bushism?) or backing off from regime change (either way, Obama was wrong)\u2014has now lost interest in the story.\u00a0\u00a0 After a sour prediction that Obama would try to take credit for Mubarak\u2019s concession in his forthcoming speech about the Egyptian revolution, Limbaugh has been concertedly focusing on Obamacare\u2014which is of course his right, it\u2019s just that the sudden change of focus is rather startling.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Expect an outpouring of right-wing bile towards whatever Obama says about Egypt, as if any president wouldn\u2019t want to align himself with what at this moment cannot help but conjure up hopes for greater openness in the Middle East\u2014even if those hopes are ultimately dashed,<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 But I could better stomach the right-wing media\u2019s effort to discredit the Egyptian revolution and to portray it as a failure of Obama\u2019s diplomacy if they had not given such unthinking jingoistic support to Bush\u2019s Freedom Agenda, if Sean Hannity\u2019s theme song was not \u201cLet Freedom Ring,\u201d if they didn\u2019t claim a divine mandate to lead the world towards American-style democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Fox News reporter, speaking from Cairo half an hour ago, did not receive the right-wing-media talking points.\u00a0 Back in the New York studio, a Fox blonde had been skeptically quizzing Alan Colmes about all the downsides to Mubarak\u2019s stepping … Continue reading