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Arab Spring

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Last month, Fox's KT McFarland was attacking President Obama's policy in the Middle East and calling it a failure because he did the opposite of George Bush. This Saturday, she was back, going after Hillary Clinton and telling more lies about their drummed up fake scandal, Benghazi-gate and making the absurd claim that the Middle East was pro-American and stable until President Obama was elected and these uprising we've seen with the Arab Spring.

I'm not sure just how much more revisionist history someone could manage to pack into a four or five minute interview as we had here, but McFarland was doing her best to set a record with the amount of b.s. she was shoveling. Never mind anything that happened under Republican presidents. Everything was perfect until the Kenyan usurper came along and got himself elected.

JARRETT: What do we expect to hear from Secretary Clinton? Joining me now to talk about it KT McFarland, Fox News national security analysts. And, one takes her letter word when she and her spokespersons say she's been ill but she has certainly managed to dodge a lot of this event since September 11.

MCFARLANE: Yeah, you know Gregg, she says she takes full responsibility, but so far she's managed to avoid taking any blame. One thing though I think with these hearings, this will probably be the last opportunity these lawmakers have to question Secretary Clinton as Secretary of State and I hope instead of looking back and saying well “What did you now when did you now it?” and “Why did you talk about the video?” I hope instead they focus forward.

Which is “Why have you not responded?” Why has the American government not responded to these attacks? Why have we not gone after the people who killed our own? Because we know that ten years ago or in the late 1980's... '90's... 1998 East Africa bombings US embassies were bombed. 2000 and the USS Cole was bombed. We did not retaliate. We beefed up security. We changed the rules of engagement, but we never went after al-Qaeda and we knew al-Qaeda had done those attacks.

What happened as a result? Bin Laden said, let's go get them again and my concern, and I hope these lawmakers ask Secretary Clinton why has the United States not gotten those people who killed ours? We know where those people are. We could do a drone strike against them.

And then I think Gregg the second point they ought to ask her is why in two years have we gone from a Middle East which was stable and secure and pro-American to a Middle East which is in political and economic chaos, and and governments that are anti-American and increasingly turned over to Islamist radicals.

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Jon Stewart took a shot at Sarah Palin as well on this Monday evening's The Daily Show, but he spent the majority of this segment absolutely skewering Sean Hannity and Dan Senor, or as we like to call him, Baghdad Bob, for their sheer and utter hypocrisy on the topic of whether the United States ought to be promoting democracy around the world.

Apparently their view is completely dependent on whether it's George W. Bush, or that Kenyan usurper they hate so much in the White House. Stewart ended the segment by having Senor literally debate himself.

Maybe that hack Scarborough can show Senor this clip the next time they decide to have that neocon warmonger sitting in on the entire three hours of Morning Joke again.



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From Fox's Journal Editorial Report, Wall Street Journal editorial director Daniel Henninger along with host Paul Gigot and another of their editorial writers, Matthew Kaminski discussing what Gigot called the "biggest foreign policy story of 2011, the Arab Spring. And in typical Fox fashion where what's up is down and black is white, we get this bit of commentary on the cause of the uprisings from Henninger:

HENNINGER: Now, admittedly our options are limited, but why are they limited? The Arab Spring started last January. At least eleven nations erupted against existing dictatorships. The United States' reaction was we don't know what to do because we don't know who these people are, because we aren't engaged with those people.

GIGO: But for precisely that reason, we played or in part because of that reason, in part because of the reluctance of the Obama administration to lead in the world; you know they like to “lead from behind” as one of the advisers famously told The New Yorker. They've played a pretty passive role here. And so is that...

HENNIGER: Well I think they've done that as a matter of policy. They do not want to lead. They want to engage with other multilateral institutions. But I think what you're seeing in the Middle East is a microcosm of what the world looks like when the world's leading power disengages itself. It begins to spin out of control on its own and this is why this will occur in other parts of the world if we don't show global responsibility.

Which by engaging, what they're talking about naturally is threatening to or allowing Israel to go ahead and bomb Iran. They're just aching for a return to the days of George W. Bush and the neocons and more military engagements in the Middle East, facts and how badly that's worked out for us in the past be damned and they'll use any excuse to continue to push for just that as they did here. Heaven forbid we've got all this messy protesting and uprisings going on where people are tired of dictators and oppression. We'd better get more "engaged" to put a stop to it.

I think our meddling in the Middle East and propping up these dictators over the years that the populations are rising up against has done quite enough damage already, thank you. And to claim that we're not "engaged" already when we've still got thousands of troops and contractors over there and are doing drone attacks in the name of this fiasco they call the "war on terror" is utterly ridiculous.



The Pictures From Egypt That Have Shocked A Nation

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By now you might have seen this latest disgrace from Egypt, more brutality that we've come to expect from the the military which still runs Egypt, despite former dictator Mubarak's departure last February. The video below has been viewed a million times at YouTube, and the photo has made frontpages of newspapers around the world. What has shocked Egyptians, even those who still give these thugs the benefit of the doubt, are their attacks on women.

via Max Fisher at The Atlantic.

The above photo shows Egyptian army soldiers beating a young woman in Tahrir Square in Cairo on Saturday, the second straight day of clashes with protesters that began on Friday and continued overnight. There's no reason to believe that there was anything special about this woman or even about the way that soldiers treated her. Members of the army, once beloved by Egypt's activists for standing by their side during the revolution in February, have sent hundreds of men and women to the hospital over the last 48 hours and have killed at least 10, some with live ammunition fired into crowds.

But there is something especially barbaric about this photo. The taboo of violence against unarmed women is unusually strong in the Arab world. But to watch three soldiers beat a defenseless woman with batons, their fists, and for one extraordinarily cruel soldier with his boot, is not even the most provocative part. For these men to pull her black abaya above her head and expose her midriff and chest is, for Egypt, a profound and sexually charged humiliation. And there is a certain awful irony of using that abaya, a symbol of modesty and piety, to cover her face and drag her on the street that, though probably not intentional, will not be lost on Egyptian eyes. Here, below, is part of the photo pulled out in detail.

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Herman Cain tut-tuts the 'Arab Spring'

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Yes, it's an awful shame was has happened to despots like Mubarak in Egypt, Saleh in Yemen, and that poor unfortunate Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

via James Oliphant at the L.A. Times:

Cain was also highly critical of the Obama administration approach to the "Arab Spring" uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Cain said the situations in Egypt, Libya and Yemen had “gotten completely out of hand," and he criticized Obama for not supporting former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and for calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen to step aside.

Newt Gingrich, to whom Cain deferred on several occasions, also seemed concerned about the uprisings.

The degree to which the Arab Spring might become an anti-Christian spring is something that bothers me a great deal,” he said.



"Can't Stop Me" - is the Arab Spring a Music-Driven Revolution?

I began assembling video clips of the Arab Spring with the intent of showing the Libyan conflict in the context of a larger regional event. Then I came across a CBS story about Chris Jeon, a UCLA student who lived with a brigade of Libyan rebels over the Summer:

“Their taste in music was interesting,” he said. “They’re in love with Justin Bieber, and when they said that I was like, ‘Oh are you serious?’”

They were serious. While the existence of an Arab "youth bulge" has been understood for years, Westerners seem unaware that young Arabs enjoy their iPods as much as any American teenager. These youth are not particularly interested in fundamentalism or caliphates: they want the freedom to rock, and woe to anyone who tries holding them back.

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Bachmann Calls Arab Spring ‘Radical’

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We're going to see more of this shameless pandering for the Jewish vote next year. Or more accurately stated, the use of Middle East unrest and the continuing Israel-Palestinian problem by politicians to further their own ends. Nothing new in that either. But few are going to go as far as Michele Bachmann in declaring that the fall of Arab dictators is a bad thing and not in the interests of either the United States or Israel.

From the National Journal.

LOS ANGELES – Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann on Friday decried the “Arab Spring” that has toppled three dictators and given rise to pro-democracy protests across the Middle East for promoting the “rise of radical elements” across the region.

In a speech to about 400 Republicans gathered for the state party’s fall convention here, the three-term Minnesota congresswoman blamed President Obama for “the hostilities of the Arab spring” and expressed regret that “we saw (Egyptian) President (Hosni) Mubarak fall while President Obama sat on his hands.”

She got her biggest applause line of the evening when she accused Obama of asking Israel to return to its “indefensible” pre-1967 borders. Obama in May said a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians should be based on the borders -- with land swaps --before the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbors, a position that angered some in Israel and Israel's conservative supporters in the U.S.

Popular uprisings have forced the ouster this year of longtime strongmen who ruled Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, but some conservatives are worried that the movement has cost the U.S. key allies in the region and is in danger of being hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists hostile to American interests.

Republicans suddenly see an opportunity to make inroads among Jewish voters, long a core Democratic constituency: Earlier this week, voters in a New York City congressional district that includes one of the heaviest concentrations of Jews in the country gave an upset victory in a special congressional election to a Republican candidate who made an issue of Obama’s Israel policy.