11/23/12, "Pharoah," Richard Fernandez, PJ Media
"It’s surprising to realize that the phrase “one man, one vote, one time” was initially a slogan for electoral reform; meant as the opposite to the slogan “vote early and often” which is now the beau ideal of liberals. “One man, one vote, one time” has now come to symbolize the cynical process
by which strongmen use the democratic process to end it;
using the vote to abolish voting.
The principal has been restated by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan as “democracy is just a tool, not the aim. Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”
The Egyptian President has reached the stop....
In a word Morsi is the very kind of dictator which President Obama so vehemently denounced in Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian President had the decency to delay raising the Jolly Roger until he received billions in aid from the West via the IMF and until he had received billions in military aid from the most far-seeing administration in American history.
Yet all that Obama has changed by his touted “leading from behind” is in replacing one strongman friendly to the United States with a strongman opposed to it. The administration has the temerity to call this smart diplomacy. It is also another milestone on the road to a catastrophe in the Middle East."...via Lucianne
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A 2011 Zogby poll in six Arab countries found Obama has driven anti-American sentiment even higher than it was under George Bush. (parag. 25 in article)
9/19/11, "How Obama's destabilizing the world" Salon.com, Nick Turse
"American troops are on the ground in an increasing number of volatile countries -- and they're making things worse"
"It's a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called "the arc of instability." It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them -- from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia -- Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly,
- in outright war or what passes for peace.
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5/17/11, "Obama's Reset: Arab Spring or Same Old Thing?" The Nation, Nick Turse
"Since the summer of 2009, President Obama, by way of the Pentagon and with State Department approval, has regularly notified Congress of his intent to sell advanced weaponry to governments across the Middle East, including Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the UAE. Under US law, Congress then has 30 days to review the sale before the Pentagon and associated military contractors enter into more formal contract talks with individual nations.
The agreement to broker the sale of tens of billions of dollars' worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia sheds light on the Pentagon’s efforts to shield itself—and its favored arms dealers—from the shakiness of the American economy, as well as President Obama’s stated goal of trimming $400 billion from projected national security spending of $10 trillion over the next twelve years. Last October, the Pentagon started secretly lobbying financial analysts and large institutional investors on behalf of weapons makers and other military contractors. The idea was to bolster their long-term financial viability in the face of a possible future slowdown in Defense Department spending.
Since then, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn and other Pentagon power brokers have made regular trips to New York City to shore up Wall Street’s support for weapons manufacturers. “We are in this for the long term. We need industrial partners and financial backers who think and act likewise,” Lynn told investors at a recent defense and aerospace conference in that city."...
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Ed. note: It's only catastrophe if you imagined Israel would survive being surrounded by savages armed to the teeth courtesy of the US taxpayer.
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