Beaten up in Egypt

Egypt has been hard on the pundits. It’s just hard to know what to make of  it, with  John McCain calling for Mubarak to resign and Glenn Beck screaming Mubarak has to stay (imagine the dilemma this puts Fox News in). And who gets the credit for this democratic uprising? Little W, for the Iraq domino effect (although those dominoes took an awful long time falling, and did so much damage as they fell)? Condi Rice, for her 2005 Cairo oratory, or Obama, for his in 2009?

And it was especially hard on Anderson Cooper:

This video was painful to watch. Gorgeous, rich Anderson Cooper, symbol of American exceptionalism, almost beaten up by Mubarak’s thugs.

Bush, Condi, Obama – the protests really had nothing to do with them; and America, despite over a billion in foreign aid to Egypt, has very little influence on the outcome.

I fear it’s not going to end well in Egypt.

My point exactly

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Just like 24, and no need for Jack Bauer

It’s like the TV show 24: at 6:28 pm the car appears on video. Two minutes later the T-shirt vendor gets suspicious, finds a convenient mounted policeman who sees the fireworks and propane tanks and clocks inside and decides, at 6:33, to evacuate Times Square.

If it had been 24 Faisal Shahzad would have been arrested at 11:45 that night, but in our real world two nights later is just as good.

That’s pretty impressive counter-terrorism. I’m sure, though, that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and John Yoo will find one thing missing.

A scientific analysis of the New York Times Best Seller List

Six weeks and counting, at the top of the best seller list. She must be really glad she decided to switch careers, especially since this one, when you have a ghost writer, is so much easier than figuring out how to destroy Alaska.

Plus, she’s in such good company, with people who write as badly as she does: Mitch Albom, who is still milking the platitudes of his dying teacher, and Glenn Beck (well, I have to confess I’ve not read Glenn Beck, or even watched him cry on TV, so I’m just being a knee-jerk liberal here), who at least gets the little dagger (†). (I guess “dagger” is the technically correct word, since that’s what the Times calls it, but I would have called it a cross, which is maybe less evocative but more symbolically correct, since it’s nearly always right-wing Christian-type books that benefit from the bulk sales it represents.)

Poor Ted Kennedy must be finding it hard to get some air, squeezed in fourth place under those three.

Cuban Missile Crisis

As we waited for the president’s speech that night in 1962, I wrote about Death (capitalizing it, teenager style) in my diary. “PRESIDENT GRAVE” was the sub-head in the New York Times, under the eight column headline.

And the next day, of all days, we had one of those crazy air raid drills at school – out in the hall, crouched by our lockers, arms wrapped around our necks.

Glenn Beck cries and says those were simpler times. I’m not so sure.

Just call me Glenn

I have a confession to make. If I had heard that President Bush was going to address schoolchildren, and that the administration’s lesson plans included writing a letter about how to help him, I’d be outraged. And yes, I’d use the word indoctrination.

But Obama’s address? That’s fine by me (except for the letters). And I think the big right-wing furor over it is ridiculous, and designed, as all their rants are, to undermine him.

So I guess I’m as far left as Beck is right. But here’s the difference: I don’t have a TV show