700 dead and counting in Egypt: Despite Hand Wringing, Massacres Suit US Policy

By John Grant

 
Watching the White House squirm over the on-going massacres in Egypt one doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or resort to the vaudevillian method and throw rotten vegetables at them.

President Obama's “condemnation” of the Egyptian military’s massacre of civilians sounded like obligatory ass-covering. Then there was the slippery boiler-plate verbiage spouted by the White House’s new spokesman with the wonderfully apropos name of Josh Earnest. I wouldn't josh you, that's his name. And trust me, he’s the personification of earnestness.

The sense of absurdity in the air takes one back to the halcyon days of Richard Nixon and his “credibility gap,” which now seems like child's play. Incredibly, even John McCain has a more critical analysis of the Egyptian coup.

It's a real low point in the Obama presidency. They no doubt have the capacity to go lower, but the President golfing and cocktail partying with rich corporate donors on Martha’s Vineyard while the Egyptian military shoots over 700 citizens to death in the street is pretty bad.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry has been shuttling around the world trying to make everyone believe night is day and, somehow, a deal between a settlement-focused Israel and a sovereign Palestine is possible. These days Kerry sounds like the man who ate the canary spouting optimistic sound bites as he spits out little yellow pin feathers.

Here’s Earnest Josh on the Cairo problem:

“We have repeatedly called on the Egyptian military and security forces to show restraint." It was like the US was saying to General Sisi, "We wish you could be nicer. C'mon, show a little restraint. Please!" If a satiric novelist like Christopher Buckley had come up with a name like Josh Earnest for a guy delivering flak to cover up a massacre readers would balk. It makes you wonder if there is a God and maybe he has a sense of humor.

As he squirmed for the press, Earnest Josh didn't parse the facts and declare whether the Egyptian military was blowing off the US government as an impotent paper tiger or whether it was the usual wink-and-nod operation in which Egypt’s imperial patron was dishing out the usual line of crap about human rights with one side of its face while the real policy of establishing facts-on-the-ground in support of the US choice for stability in the Middle East was going down on the streets of Cairo...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1919