Agreed. You may as well pit Hitler.
Any faithful reader of The Onion knows that this isn’t outside of Biden’s powers:
Biden To Cool His Heels In Mexico For A While
But the timing is bad since his band has to play at the upcoming SuperBowl anyway:
The Joe Biden Band
Pols at press conferences can do this pretty well because there isn’t much chance for a follow-up to press them on the issue. But on a one-on-one interview with Jim Lehrer, Biden’s not getting away with a non-answer, at least not without looking painfully clueless.
Plus, its kinda silly to label a more-or-less accurate description of well known US policy as a “gaffe”.
Do you think something like that could ever happen?
No, we won’t be pleased, and as the U.S. flags get burned in the streets, we’ll probably cry all over again: “What did we ever do to deserve this?”
Biden had the perfect opportunity. Because he is often thought to just say stuff without thinking, he could actually say something against Mubarak without it being a big deal at all.
My understanding of the Egyptian-American relationship is that it’s never really been about fostering pro-American feelings amongst the population of Egypt. It’s rather been about us giving Egypt a lot of money and in exchange Egypt agreed to not continually invade Israel. During the Cold War it was also desired that Egypt try to remain mostly neutral between Soviet/American spheres of influence (well, it was desired by us they be pro-American, but barring that neutrality in which they took money from both sides was better than them being a Soviet satellite state.)
The fear is that if Islamist reactionaries seize control in Egypt they won’t be amenable to the current status quo relationship. In which case what benefit is there of any relationship between us and them at all?
Okay, not amenable to the current status quo. But is it binary? Current status quo or “Death to the American Satan!”?
If there’s any real estate between the two conditions, some fence-mending wouldn’t necessarily be a BAD idea…
The Washington Monument is like a tower…
The Muslim Brotherhood is generally considered the strongest opposition group in Egypt, and the most likely to take over if Mubarak goes down. And they’d probably be worse then the status-quo in the view of the US, Israel and people that’d like to see a modern democracy in Egypt, though its kind of hard to tell since they’ve never been able to gain much power in Egypt to show what they’d do with it if they had it.
But in anycase, fear of the Muslim Brotherhood setting up a theocracy in Egypt is probably the main reason the US doesn’t throw Mubark to the wolves.
Yup, and lord knows that’s never come back to bite us in the ass before. I mean, boy, would our faces be red if something ever surfaced like, say, a picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. Hah! Or could you imagine if the U.S. had supplied funds that had helped fund the start of al Qaeda? Wouldn’t *that *be embarassing!
Let me just say, that sounds like a t-shirt I would wear the hell out of.
Before declaring tonight’s winner of best supporting mixed metaphor, I’d like to say a few words about sustainable commercial deep-ocean fishing.
I liked McCain in a Fox interview calling democracy movements in the ME a virus. Why would he say that out loud? Chomsky must’ve slipped him a c-note.