This piece ran while our president was trying to restructure Egypt to his liking.

I'm a little confused about this whole Egypt thing, and I was hoping someone out there might explain some of this to me. I'm pretty confused about a lot that happens in this world, so me getting a bit flummoxed over one country in the Middle East shouldn't surprise anyone. I have always figured if you draw a north-south line through London (I think somebody already has, and they called it the prime meridian) and you go east until ya get a bit east of Berkeley to draw another line, just about every country included in between these two lines, save New Zeland and perhaps Australia, is kinda nuts. So Egypt going bonkers is no surprise. Because the last time I looked, Egypt is in the Middle East, and that neighborhood is the most whacked of them all. So I guess I should be heading toward a “Who Cares?” moment, but I'm not.

Once upon a time, Egypt was a civilized country. That was a few thousand years ago, and although the definition of civilization was a tad looser then, those folks did build the pyramids and some other really neat stuff when nearly all of the rest of the world was still dragging knuckles. The Egyptians haven't done squat since, but they bask in the reflected glory of their ancestors to this day. And cash the tourist checks when they can. But as civilizations go, they mostly are little more than place holders these days.

Egypt doesn't have huge deposits of oil sitting under their sand, so unlike some of their other Arab brothers, they have nothing to offer the civilized nations of the world. So except for when they are failing at invading Israel, they languish among the “Who Cares” of the world. And they are by no means a civilized nation today. So they blend in pretty well with the rest of the Arab world.

You can argue til the cows come home about how well or poorly our imperfect version of representative government meets the needs of the average citizen, but you can also count on the fingers of, oh heck one or two fingers, the number of countries on this entire earth that house citizens who have significant say in their government. The whole rest of the world, and particularly that bunch of countries between those two lines, pretty much is full of countries that have governments that run themselves with no notice of the folks they govern.

And that would include Egypt. That Mubarak character has been in charge for some thirty years, and he has played the role of leader of an Arab country, which means he leaves rich and his subjects end up with nothing. So after waiting patiently for those thirty years, the people of Egypt finally mentioned that it isn’t going real good, and then all heck breaks loose. And that’s what I’m wondering about.

The thing I’m wondering about is that part where our Media, from the very first moment that the dissent broke out in Cairo, was bound and determined to run Mubarak out of office, and our Media did everything in their power to encourage Egyptian dissent, and to influence our most easily influenced president to encourage the man to quit, and I’m wondering why. Here is a country that will exchange one corrupt leader for another without a moment’s hesitation, and our Media is encouraging that. And don’t you wonder why?

I’ve been around for a while, and occasionally I actually pay attention, and I still don’t remember when the liberals turned against Israel. When I was in college I met a bunch of people. Included in that bunch were those of the Jewish persuasion. Every one, if memory serves, was a liberal. I fit in, cause I was a raving liberal then, too. Pretty much every liberal I met in college was pro Israel. But somewhere along the line since then, the liberals have turned against our ally, and since the bulk of the Media is now very liberal, it has invested considerable effort in the anti-Israel movement.

And now the Media is uniformly aligned against Mubarak. Short history lesson here…. Mubarak actually signed a treaty of peace with Israel, and unlike that entire bunch of Arab countries in the Middle East, he has actually not reneged and attacked Israel for several years. And apparently, that is really annoying to our massed Media. Doesn’t it bother you that our Media wants Mubarak gone, so that his replacement will likely turn on Israel at the very first opportunity? Or should we all believe that the Media really is naïve enough to think that those rioting citizens in Egypt will actually create the very first functional democracy in the history of the Arab world, and therefore they should be encouraging this revolution?