The story today was that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would be resigning by nightfall. Although reported universally in the US media, it's hard to know where this idea came from. It certainly did not come from any special diplomatic or covert channels. Even CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that his comments on Mubarak's "imminent" resignation from watching the news. President Obama, eager to claim credit for this "victory," even gave one of his patented "transformative" speeches (We Are Witnessing! A Transformative Moment! In History!). Uh, did anyone ask Mubarak about this? The Obama team’s hopes for an “immediate” transition seemed to have been dashed as Mubarak took to the airwaves in Egypt to say he planned to stay as president until September but cede an unspecified degree of authority to his hand-picked vice president, Omar Suleiman.
Responding to the day’s events in a statement that did not mention Mubarak, Obama said that while a “transition of authority” has been promised the Egyptian people, “it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful or sufficient.”
The president called for the Egyptian government “to spell out in clear and unambiguous language the step by step process that will lead to democracy and the representative government that the Egyptian people seek.
Mubarak’s muddled message was far from what U.S. officials had expected.
What's next? Is Obama going to start demanding that the CIA "plug the damn hole?" I'd love to know where, besides the Land of Wishes and Fairy Tales, this idea that Mubarak was resigning came from. Are we tapping his phones, or something? Has the media suddenly become fluent in Arabic? Obama's premature victory speech looks especially ludicrous in the harsh light of contrary events
In a speech in Michigan, President Barack Obama seemed to feed the narrative that dramatic change in Egypt was imminent. “What is absolutely clear is that we are witnessing history unfold,” an upbeat Obama said. “It’s a moment of transformation that’s taking place because the people of Egypt are calling for change.”
Jesus, you'd think he was talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall, rather than the loss of a dependable US ally. You can only imagine what Mubarak must think. When he took office back in 1981 following the Sadat assassination, Obama was a college student going to "socialist conferences" at the Cooper Union Hall. Now the "upbeat" Obama is celebrating the fictitious fall of a one of America's few friends in the Middle East while his subordinates and ideological allies lecture us about how the "secular" Muslim Brotherhood has renounced violence and has no connection to terrorism. Obama might have run that by Mubarak first, seeing as how Mubarak has been the target of Brotherhood assassins, including those of Sadat's.
This is rapidly becoming a case where history won't be able to repeat itself. Obama et al. have already been farcical without passing through tragedy.
