Friday, February 04, 2011

Where Is Egypt? Show Me The Way!


Fig. 1. This is NOT Hosni, but the most excellent Sir Cedric Hardwicke in the role of Pharaoh Sethi in Cecil B. DeMille's Technicolor production of 'The Ten Commandments', in VistaVision

I join in solidarity with the pro-democracy movement in Egypt, as any right-thinking person would or should. Surely they can come up with a better government than we have here in the USA. Egypt deserves the chance to reinvent itself, which they haven't been allowed to do in this modern world.

Mubarak said of Obama (paraphrase), 'He is a good man, but he doesn't understand Egyptian society. If I leave, chaos would result.' I add: 'Yes, an Egyptian society that YOU created, influenced, coerced. It stands to reason that you doth protest.' A dictator may address a 'weak' president in terms both condescending and haughty.

His is the classic failure of a dictator whose time has run out. His slaughter of the innocents shall not be forgotten.

The imminent departure of Pharaoh Hosni The First and Last must and shall be - imminent.

To quote Yul Brynner in 'The Ten Commandments', 'The royal eagle has flown unto the sun' (e.g. Saudi Arabia). No Moses awaits at the Red Sea to provide an avenue, but any number of US-supplied aircraft can be scrambled at a moment's notice. Beverages served.

So shall it be written, so shall it be DONE.

I've found Al Jazeera, Democracy Now! and Link TV to be valuable sources throughout this intense situation. BBC wasn't too bad, either, for more mainstream audiences.

On a more banal plane, I haven't been wasting time with NPR, but here's a little news item of interest:

Tom Ashbrook had a classic Neocon approach to Egypt on 'On Point' this Fri.

That is, David Sanger and - get ready - Tom Gjelten. Uh-huh. And yesterday he had Nick Burns on, whose lullaby-voiced BS has caused a lot of trouble in the world. (One caller-in astutely labeled Burns 'part of the problem' of Mubarakism (my term).)

Anyway, just an observation about Gjelten (who deserves sustained criticism for the foreseeable future): on this show, he said absolutely NOTHING. Not only nothing of value (naturally), but nothing but filler words parroting what's already known. And he got paid for it.

My point: when he's got a CIA-approved script in front of him, he's Mr. Gravitas, but when he's semi-off the cuff (he couldn't survive without a 'cuff' of some kind), he's as vacuous as Sarah Palin.

Thus, as we know, Gjelten is the perfect vessel to fill by others then pour out onto Neocon Public's airwaves.

Prediction: these overpaid blab-heads in their comfort zones will really start to lose their audiences, because their audiences have already figured out this stuff and have advanced past it. They will get their info from other sources, making things like NPR irrelevant, unnecessary, and prohibitively costly.

Gjelten's most profound statement in the show: 'Ronald Reagan's genius was his sense of timing. He sensed that the Berlin Wall was about to fall...' etc. Spoken by a true believer.

And not bad for an Alzheimers' dude! They can have epiphanies we can't even guess at - I guess. Viz: Ron Reagan's insights on his dad's illness; Gjelten & Co. will no doubt deny Ron's 'skewed' outlook. Conversely, it's like The Don (Rumsfeld) blaming the rush into Iraq on his son's drug abuse. If you were The Don's son, you'd do drugs, too. And there’s no one better to blame a war on than a druggie.

Or, what I meant to say was: believing that Reagan 'sensed' that the Berlin Wall was coming down is like Rumsfeld going along with BushCo's Iraq war desires because he was 'distracted' at the moment by his son's drug problems.

Psychotic reasoning is always a criminal's best defense.

Job opportunities for otherwise disenfranchised sociopaths are always available in top leadership positions in this world.

3 comments:

  1. Here! Here! Well stated on Hosni and even better said re: Tom Ashbrook, I can't stand that guy!!! An empty headed alarmist.

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  2. I also totally support the Egyptians to come up with something better than they've experienced the last three decades and to hell with NPR for their part in trying to thwart that.

    Well said! I find Tom Ashbrook completely unbearable to listen to on world affairs. It seems to be required for automatons like Gjelten to be automatons who have to work by a script or a cuff because how else would the precise neo con message get out?

    Ashbrook is another one of those guys in love with his reasonable sounding voice. Not as bad as some of the other NPR narcissists but bad enough.

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  3. Yes indeed, the lurid carnival that is NPR has many geeks who bite off the chicken head every day.

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