Garbage Analysis

The writer of the web teaser to Roger Cohen's column is very curious: "Mubarak has a confused sense of power." Intriguing but what does that mean? Mubarak has held power, a brutal absolute power that we are extremely lucky not to know first hand in the United States, for 30 years. Fifty-something Egyptians  have lived their entire adult lives under a brutal, corrupt, oppressive government.

Inside the section, the headline, "The Mubarak Muddle" is more sedate and the text itself is wishy washy, like most columns in the paper. Pontification is pretty much the same all over. It mimics knowledge. Maybe it's just me, but I don't really care for them.

Until I came to the end of the column, there was little but aimlessness. In the last two paragraphs, my eyes opened wide. From the protests on the streets, sprang an ecological conscience and an aversion to sexual harassment in Egypt. I know it's politically correct to project liberal western values onto other cultures, this psychological maneuver doesn't even hold here when one considers the far right in America and Europe, which vociferiously rejects these same liberal values. What makes all these wide-eyed people believe that people in dirt poor countries where the masses cling to a medieval version of religion have seen the light?

What's the evidence, according to Cohen?

The garbage. The demonstrators in Cairo are carefully separating their garbage. And sex? One woman says that men are not hitting on her in the square.

To quote Suleiman from Egypt: "In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate," would you like to bet on this 18-day transformation, Roger?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/opinion/11cohen.html

Of course, the big news from Egypt is not this, but that Mubarak has quit and gone to his summer home. The Times is on it. So is every other site. No one has started interpreting it -- it's only noon here -- so I will. A military government doesn't sound like a democracy. The poor people of Egypt aren't home free yet, but it's likely they'll have to choose among government types that you see in Algeria, or Syria, or Iran. But who wants to listen to me pontificate? One thing I do know. The front page of the paper Times is moot by now.

Let's come back home for a bit. The front page has another of these endless stories about how many billions the Republicans want to promise to cut from the federal budget. The key word here is promise. None of these right-wingers wants to say what he or she wants to cut, and none of the hard-hitting reporters anywhere has shown any evidence of knowing or conveying what these are. The Democrats want to tell you that the cuts will have dire consequences -- so perhaps they've seen the cuts. In all likelihood what we have here is a pair of dueling press releases with attendant sound bites.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us/politics/11congress.html