I didnt say lying in a campaign necessarily deligitimizes any election. I said the millions of Egyptians who voted with their feet after a year of Morsi’s Islamist rule is what delegitimized Morsi’s election. Do you think the revolutionaries in Egypt must pay heed to you to figure out if Morsi’s elected government was legitimate or not. If secular and moderate Egyptians felt Morsi lied to them who are you to dispute them?
Then they would have easily voted him out in the next election. That’s called democracy. What they had was a military coup.
As much as I don’t like Morsi, I don’t like the idea of an electoral mulligan.
Do you have anything to add to the discussion besides the usual unrelated personal insult that I have no point other than to say Obama can do no wrong.
If Obama has done something wrong on Egypt and that is your facts base view lets have it.
Dissonance and Mace have accused me of denying that a military coup took place in Egypt. That was a gross error. I did not deny that at all. In waiting for them to admit their error?
So while we wait, what do you got on Ovama since you brought it up?
I’ve never said they were exercising democracy as we know it. I’ve never said they didn’t have a military coup. I am saying that the revolutionaries and the military are having a revolution and they are not going to step aside for three years to watch an Islamist with ties to terrorists and one who could not function to bring back the economy, take Egypt down the path of darkness of Islamist rule just so perfectionists in the USA can be satisfied that the revolutionaries are doing democracy right and by the Jeffersonian handbook.
So what is your point if you can’t argue agsinst what I’m actually saying?
I would say so… Richard Nixon resigned…but only because more than 2/3 of the Senate said they would vote to remove him from office in an impeachment trial. The handwriting was on the wall. I think Mubarak was in a similarly untenable position. “Dead man walking.” He resigned, before they could come and remove him, whether or not by force.
Don’t like the Mulligan eh? That’s rich. I say if the Egyptians want a Milligan they should have all the mulligans they need to get the revolution right.
What Egyptian should care what an American with no family ties to Egypt thinks. Maybe a hard core Egyptian Islamist doesn’t like the Out with Morsi Mulligan too.
Have you ever stopped to think what harm Morsi and his hand picked terrorist sympathizing officials could do? You want to prim and proper wait for a next election? What if three years down the road he had managed to consolidate power over the army and absolute alienated all western nations and destroyed Egypt’s economy, destroying a main industry, that is tourism, all for Islamist rule?
I don’t think you are the language police so thanks for responding.
Is it fair to say Mubarik was forced to step down?
Is it fair to say that Morsi was forced to step down?
Morsi was arrested immediately and Mubarik was arrested later.
I’m saying they were both forced to resign.
They were both replaced by the same military leadership.
So why are some arguing that US aid should have ceased after Morsi was forced out, but was ok to continue aid after Mubarik was forced out?
Some here love to quibble over the most trivial differences in meanings of words while ignoring the broader range being discussed.
It is quite peculiar to say the least.
It’s not so much an insult as an observation.
OK. You now agree that there was a coup in Egypt. US law says that no aid should go to a government after a coup. Obama wants to violate US law and send aid to Egypt.
Do you think that Obama should violate his oath to faithfully execute the laws of the United States?
Apparently his name is hard to spell.
Regards,
Shodan
When Mubarak handed the government over to the military was it a forced resignation or was it unforced by any outside pressure? In other words did he just decide to do it for personal reasons?
Since it was directed to me I take it as an insult.
I do not ‘now’ agree that what happened to Morsi was a coup because I have never argued that it was not a coup. I posted what I wrote and suggest you go back and read it. My response was to you. So your lack of awareness of my statements on the coup is inexcusable.
I have never advocated that Obams should violate snything? What is your point?
I might be called a “civilian auxiliary” to the language police. Ask me about “who/whom” sometime. 
Mostly political appearances. It looked as if Mubarak’s departure would lead to a closer approach to true democracy, whereas Morsi’s departure, necessary as it may have been, is still a break away from democracy. The U.S. notion is that “elections are good,” to a very high degree.
A great many of us are, in fact, relieved at Morsi’s ouster, because he appeared to be undermining democracy. He looked to have been building up an internal power structure – stacked courts, rigged parliament, etc. – that would guarantee him victory in sham elections. (The old Soviet Union had elections…they just weren’t meaningful in any sense. Look at how many times Saddam Hussein was “re-elected.”)
But, still, it violates our most sacred cow: democracy is good, authoritarian rule is bad.
No, several paths exist where aid could continue as needed.
Here’s a suggestion from the Heritage Foundation Last August:
!!“To avoid jeopardizing the important benefits of strategic cooperation with Egypt, the Administration should work with Congress to gain the legal authority to provide aid on a conditional basis as long as Egypt’s interim government remains committed to a democratic transition. Aid should be renewed only if the interim government schedules free and fair elections, reverses the Morsi regime’s crackdown on pro-democracy NGOs, and publicly commits to (1) fully protecting U.S. citizens and property, particularly the U.S. embassy and other diplomatic posts; (2) maintaining the peace treaty with Israel; (3) cooperating in fighting al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations; and (4) implementing policies that protect the rights of its citizens, including due process of law and freedom of religion, expression, and association.”!!
Read more; Egypt’s Coup Requires a Cautious U.S. Response | The Heritage Foundation
I agree with you and add that our sacred cow is not the immediate necessity in Egypt right now because of the danger of Islamists having majority rule and overpowering the sincere drive toward our sacrifice cow of fair and binding elections.
The losers must be able to accept majority rule, I do not believe
The secularists in Egypt can afford to accept majority rule if it is predominately Islamist. The rest of the world cannot accept that either.
I’m not a mind reader, but I do know the military didn’t forcibly remove him as they did with Morsi. Maybe he saw the writing on the wall and didn’t want to end up like Ceaușescu or Mussolini-- dead at the hands of the people, but not the military.
Anyway, wrt US law it doesn’t matter. He was never “duly elected” and so even if there was a coup, US law wouldn’t require the elimination of aid.
Your punctuation and paragraph breaks here make your post ambiguous.
I may not like Islamicism – I don’t like any kind of theocracy – but I hold democracy to be the higher value. If a true majority of the people want a theocracy, then, as odious as that may be, I fear it would be worse for the outside world to force them to accept a different form of government or leadership.
I support economic sanctions against countries that violate their own citizens’ human rights. But I think that history shows that overthrowing governments is an extremely risky approach, and should be avoided. We got lucky ousting Khaddafi, but we probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as lucky if we tried to oust Assad.
We (the rest of the world) pretty much have to sit back and let Egypt sort out its problems. We can influence them – giving aid, or cutting off aid – but we don’t need any more Pinochets or Pahlavis.
I pretty much agree, accept don’t be so sure about how “lucky” we got in Libya. For one thing, there was terrible spill-over into Mali, and we don’t know what Libya is going to look like a few years from now. The news is not all that good even now.
That reinforces my point. Thirty years of aid going to a dictator that was not suspended when he was forced to transfer the reins of government to the military, does not demand that the situation became upon Morsi’s election the definition of ‘duly elected government’ that the law intended to protect from US aid supporting a military coup to overthrow it. Thit situation in Egypt is unique in that the aid was going to the most stable institution in Egypt during Mubarak’s reign, after his fall from power, during Morsi’s brief shot at governing, and now.
So what is the status of the aid. Is it suspended or going to be susiended, or what?
IT. DOES. NOT. MATTER.
The Foreign Assistance Act only dates to 1961*, and there has been no “duly elected” head of state between then and now except for Morsi.
*And I don’t even know of the provision under discussion was part of the original act or added later.
What is absolutely hilarious is the gymnastics you went through to claim that the 2002 Iraq AUMF did not actually authorize Bush to wage war, contrasted with the gymnastics you are going though now to claim that a plain reading of the text of that FAA does not instruct Obama to cut off aid to Egypt after a coup.
Facts do not matter-- they are inconvenient obstacle to pushing your pre-conceived ideas.
You’re not fooling anyone here.
And lo and behold that is what I support our government doing. And that is exactly what our governent is doing. The Egyptians have rejected Morsi’s trend toward theocracy and sided with the military to end his diversion away from the freedoms and democracy that the revolution was all about.
I’m all for the Egyptians handling it the way they are handling it. And that includes the mulligan as J.Mace calls it because they may have to hold elections until the winner learns that he can’t do a moderate bait to get elected and then go to an Islamist switch after winning.
Why must we hold them to our sacred cow stsndards of democracy so early in their revolution’s infancy?
It was not US influence that brought so many Egyptians into the streets to call for the military to remove Morsi from power - it was all an all Egyptian uprising at that time.
I can see the good in it