Obama Is So Screwed, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #208

February 7, 2011 Mike Gold 1 Comment

My politics wonk super-ego is fascinated, but my id is screaming in terror.

Egypt is going to hell in a hand-basket, and this time I’m not enjoying the ride. On one hand, we’ve got a mid-level dictator and torturer who has been an important stabilizing force in the middle-east. On the other hand, we’ve got 80 million people in Egypt and it certainly appears that the vast majority of them want the dictator out. These folks range from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab League to business people to women to small-“d” democrats. They have only two things in common: they are Egyptians, and they want President Hosni Mubarak out… preferably about 30 years ago.

Caught in the middle is our president, who can do no right here. His mortal enemies on the far right have temporarily pussied out, except for Glenn Beck whose lunatic ravings understand neither purpose nor strategy. They have the luxury of waiting for our hapless president to finish making some sort of definitive stand, and then objecting to it no matter how much Ronald Reagan might have liked it.

Barack Obama is stuck between a quarry and a cliff. He decided to move slowly, which pisses everybody off, although in this case time is on his side. He can make little speeches talking about transition, he can have his diplomats talk to Mubarak to encourage a faster transition, but he cannot make the man leave for self-imposed exile into luxury. Personally, I’d take that deal in a heartbeat but Mubarak is too deep into his Marie Antoinette thing.

By the time you read this the protestors may have their way. If Mubarak is removed peaceably, fine. But now that Hosni’s thugs have been tear-gassing and beating the crap out of the protestors and reporters and shooting a few here and there, the hurt feelings on both sides have grown to volcanic proportions.

Obama has but one weapon: he holds the wallet that funds the Egyptian military, which is the only government force in Egypt respected by the citizenry as well as by the establishment. That’s probably not enough to maintain the level of control we have had over Egypt. Certainly the protestors are very anti-U.S. Go figure; we’ve only been paying Mubarak $1,300,000,000.00 a year for 29 years to do our bidding – keeping the peace, taking our outsourced “extraordinary rendition” work, that sort of thing.

The establishment is very anti-media; they’d even beaten the poo out of Anderson Cooper, which is something you do not do unless you’ve already got Justin Bieber’s corpse locked in your bedroom closet and have nothing to lose. Once again, the whole world is watching – and Facebooking and Tweeting – and Mubarak doesn’t understand he’s already lost. He’s blown his opportunity to take the high road, but the end result will be the same.

Except he might get killed. That’s no great loss.

As for the United States of America, well, we got this fixation with trying to bring peace to a hunk of Earth that has maintained its tribal lifeblood despite 700 years of political, religious and ethnic gerrymandering. We want to work out the whole middle-east thing, we want to bring democracy to theocratic nations (that works so well here in the U.S.), and therefore we want to avoid sending more of our nation’s youth to their deaths.

If Obama moves against the establishment, he will be perceived as anti-Israel and pro-Arab and a Muslim terrorist and Birthers around the country will rejoice. But if he moves against the protesters, he will be perceived as anti-democratic, a socialist, and a warmonger. Whatever he does, even if he doesn’t do anything, if this becomes a hot war or somebody important gets killed – Hosni Mubarak, Nobel Peace Prize winner and protest icon Mohamed ElBaradei, or even Anderson Cooper – Obama will get the blame for not doing either anything or the right thing.

Why anybody spends so much time and money trying to get this job is something I’ll never understand. My id and my super-ego might be at odds over this, but it’s the president’s ego that is going to determine our future.

Hambone, anarcho-syndicalist and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on America’s pop culture channel The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.