Lookin' Out My Back Door at Desolation Row

Okay, my back door is almost never open.  And the view from there is pretty occluded in any case.

For that matter, there is ambiguity as to which is our front door!  Go figure.

But I desperately need JF's upbeat perspective stretching back to a time when I had far more innocence to help me deal with the queasizness I continue to feel over our handling of the events in Egypt.  Given our equivocal actions, it's hard to argue with this sentiment expressed by some of the demonstrators in Egypt:

We don't hate you because we hate your freedom; we hate you because you hate our freedom

How does it feel, to be on your own?  Like a complete unknown.

As we stare into the vacuum of their eyes.

David Sirota has some frank talk for us:

In America, politicians are rarely compelled to turn rhetoric into action. Presidents make public commitments to support legislation while quietly instructing their congressional allies to kill the corresponding bills. Congresspeople then campaign on policy proposals only to make sure their respective presidents veto the initiatives.

We all know this game -- we know its rigged rules ensure plausible deniability and prevent follow through. But as the Mideast showed this week, just because those are our rules doesn't mean everyone plays by them.

That's what the Egyptian protests against U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak really represent for us: a poignant demand that we actually embody our democratic creed -- a demand whose response shows an American government desperate to avoid walking its talk.

Remember, President Obama told a Cairo audience in 2009 that America would unequivocally back Egyptians' democratic aspirations. Citing our nation's history being "born out of revolution against an empire," he said: "We will support (democracy) everywhere."

That declaration, while admirable, was hardly courageous because it was presented as a foreign-policy version of an American campaign promise -- that is, it was issued by a politician who never really expected to be asked for attendant action. In fact, the Obama administration was so certain it wouldn't have to embody its platitudes that it was actively slashing grants for democracy-building in Egypt while maintaining military aid to the Mubarak dictatorship.

As if deliberately bragging about this disconnect between pro-democratic rhetoric and undemocratic reality, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Arab television: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."

Those "friends," of course, fired "USA"-labeled tear gas canisters at the very democratic protestors America promised to support. As the demonstrations persisted, Obama discarded the bromides of his Cairo speech and refused to press for Mubarak's immediate resignation. He then dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to both praise the despot as an "ally" and tell reporters to "not refer to him as a dictator."

Following suit, Clinton said that despite America's stated commitment to democracy, "we're not advocating any specific outcome." When asked whether the administration was at least backing away from her BFF Mubarak, Clinton was reduced to Rumsfeldian incoherence, insisting that "we do not want to send any message about backing forward or backing back."

This left Egypt's Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei to humiliate our equivocating leaders by stating the obvious: "The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years will be the one to implement democracy."

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