Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Scare Quotes Alert

New York Times:
Egypt entered a perilous 48 hours on Monday when the military delivered an ultimatum to the country’s first democratically elected president, hundreds of thousands of protesters renewed calls to oust him from office and the president’s Islamists allies vowed to take to the streets to stop what they called “a military coup.”
Sorry, that's not a "military coup", that's a military coup. I'm not even condemning it, I just think it needs to be called by the right name.

The whole thing is pretty sad. It would have been so nice if Morsi had been able to succeed, in some degree, in establishing a general comfort level with constitutionality, and I thought Muslim Brothers' experience in providing social services would help. Power, as usual, corrupted. The MB insistence on writing the constitution on their own wasn't a good thing; they could have had a more Westminstery system, with some built-in instability, which makes it easier to get rid of an obnoxious Leader without tearing down the entire system, but that would have meant leaving doors open for all sorts of little parties.

As I always say with reference to Egypt it's up to the liberals, once again, to give the poor and struggling majority some reason to vote for them. Last time they were too involved with white-girl problems; maybe this time the visible presence of the People in the protests will make a difference.
Photo by AP via Huffington Post.

No comments:

Post a Comment