Poor Glenn Reynolds, he’s trying mightily to recreate the days when his opinion meant something, but that was long ago and far away and the old war-blogger doesn’t have the good sense to fade away: he’s still in there pitching pernicious memes:
“MUBARAK has resigned.
“UPDATE: Interestingly, the Shah of Iran was also forced out on February 11. Let’s hope this isn’t an omen.
“ANOTHER UPDATE: Military coup. On Facebook, lawprof Eric Muller comments: ‘It’s interesting, and to this American pair of eyes a bit odd, to see a nation cheering deliriously at the prospect of military control of the government.'”
To debunk this “Feb. 11” meme, all you have to do is follow the link, so helpfully provided by Reynolds, to the Wikipedia entry for the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which tell us “On January 16, 1979 the Shah and the empress left Iran. Scenes of spontaneous joy followed and ‘within hours almost every sign of the Pahlavi dynasty’ was destroyed.” Unlike Egypt, in Iran a significant portion of the military continued to fight the rebels, and weren’t defeated until sometime after February 11 — the day the Iranian regime, which is as fact-averse as Reynolds, commemorates the Shah’s overthrow. The truth, though, is that the Shah left a month earlier — so the analogy with Iran fails even on the most superficial level.
Oh well, facts don’t matter to the War Party, as we have seen, since they deal in fantasy narratives rather than something so prosaic as the truth.
Of course, Reynolds did not originate the 1979-is-2011 meme: he never originates anything. His job is to act as a transmission belt for the neocons’ propaganda mill, sloganizing the more complex narratives cooked up by his betters. In the past, he’s done a serviceable job, but this clumsy effort just underscores his utter irrelevance.
As for it being “odd” that the Egyptian people are cheering the military, that’s the lap-top bombardier syndrome kicking in again: you’ll recall back in the glory days of the Reynolds-war blogger set, there were all these belligerent geeks acting out their macho fantasies from quite a considerable distance away from the actual fighting. Today, these same geeks, a little long in the tooth, are snarking from the sidelines as the Democratic Revolution they supposedly wanted all along in the Arab world comes to pass.Â
Egyyptians’ enthusiasm for the military coming in is understandable if you analogize the situation thusly: imagine you are being mugged, and you’re down in the gutter being beaten by some thug, yet you somehow manage to dial 911 on your cell phone: the cops show up and save the day. This is called The Rule of Law. Being a lawyer, perhaps Senor Muller will recognize the analogy. Reynolds, too, is supposed to be some kind of lawyer, but actually he’s merely a law professor, so perhaps he might be excused for siding with the muggers over the mugged.