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Egyptian history lesson from Mark Steyn.
After midday prayers on Wednesday, just about the time the army were heading over to the presidential palace to evict Mohammed Morsi, the last king of Egypt was laying to rest his aunt, Princess Fawzia, who died in Alexandria on Tuesday at the grand old age of 91. She was born in 1921, a few months before the imperial civil servants of London and Paris invented the modern Middle East and the British protectorate of Egypt was upgraded to a kingdom, and seven years before Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power. …
… Washington has spent six decades getting Egypt wrong, ever since the CIA insouciantly joined the coup against Farouk under the contemptuous name “Operation Fat F***er.” We sank billions into Mubarak’s Swiss bank accounts, and got nothing in return other than Mohammed Atta flying through the office window. Even in a multicultural age, liberal Americans casually assume that “developing countries” want to develop into something like a Western democracy. But Egypt only goes backwards. Princess Fawzia is best remembered in the Middle East as, briefly, the first consort of the late shah of Iran, whom she left in 1946 because she found Tehran hopelessly dull and provincial after bustling, modern, cosmopolitan Cairo. In our time, the notion of Egypt as “modern” is difficult to comprehend: According to the U.N., 91 percent of its women have undergone female genital mutilation — not because the state mandates it, but because the menfolk insist on it. Over half its citizenry subsists on less than two dollars a day. A rural population so inept it has to import its food, Egyptians live on the land, but can’t live off it. …
… This week, the Brotherhood was checked — but not by anything recognizable as the forces of freedom. Is it only a temporary respite? Certainly, in the age of what Caroline Glick calls “America’s self-induced smallness,” Western ideas of real liberty have little purchase in Cairo. Egypt will get worse, and, self-induced or not, America is getting smaller.
The news from and about Egypt led to rather droll posts from Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff. Here’s the first suggesting this is the end of amateur hour.
David Goldman shows, among other things, that the Egyptian coup signals that Saudi Arabia, not the U.S., will have the leading foreign role in Egypt’s affairs going forward. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, that’s probably a good thing for Egypt under the present circumstances.
I have suggested, and Goldman goes a long way toward demonstrating, that the Egyptian turmoil is more about economics than politics. The Saudis might just be able to keep Egypt financially afloat and better fed.
Moreover, even from a political point of view, Egypt is probably better off taking its cues from the Saudis than from President Obama. As Goldman says: “The notion that [the Muslim Brotherhood's] band of Jew-hating jihadi thugs might become the vehicle for a transition to a functioning Muslim democracy was perhaps the stupidest notion to circulate in Washington in living memory.” …
John Kerry is next to feel Mirengoff’s lash with an assist from John Hinderaker.
… JOHN adds: As several readers have pointed out, the State Department has now walked back its denial that Kerry was on his yacht while the crisis in Egypt took place:
“As regime change was unfolding in Egypt, Secretary of State John Kerry spent time on his boat Wednesday afternoon in Nantucket Sound, the State Department acknowledged to CBS News on Friday, after repeatedly denying that Kerry was aboard any boat.
“While he was briefly on his boat on Wednesday, Secretary Kerry worked around the clock all day including participating in the President’s meeting with his national security council,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, naming a series of Egyptian and international officials Kerry had spoken with on Wednesday.
Psaki’s acknowledgment marked a stark reversal from previous denials that Kerry was on any boat whatsoever.”
Two observations here: First, the administration’s “lie first and figure out the facts later” approach is typical. Have we ever seen such instinctive dishonesty from any administration? Second, I share Paul’s view that the less John Kerry has to do with events in the Middle East, the better. And the same goes for Barack Obama. Yesterday my tweet on that subject was, I am proud to say, Glenn Reynolds’ “Tweet of the Day”:
“On Egypt, Obama should strive for irrelevance. It’s the best he is going to do. …”
Not fans of Lurch, The Boston Herald has some fun.
… Kerry’s vacation kerfuffle is being seen as the latest stumble in what has already been a rocky five months for the nation’s top diplomat.
“Kerry is having a pretty tumultuous tenure at the State Department,” Tom Whalen of Boston University said. “It seems everything he touches is not turning out well.”
Said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution: “I’m not sure he’s really fully established himself as the go-to guy on foreign policy in the public’s eye here in the United States. I would think he’d want to define his leadership on some of the big crises of the day. Let him have his Fourth of July weekend, but recognize that this is an issue — Egypt — where he’s probably got to step up his game.” …
Turning to President Bystander’s economic mess, CNS News tells us we have passed a record 54 months of 7.5% unemployment.
Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.
Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May.
In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed to 7.8 percent. …
Breitbart drills down into the numbers and figures only 47% of American adults have full time work. Way to go President Part-Time!
The release of the June Jobs’ Report Friday was something of a relief for the markets. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat economists’ expectations. The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don’t are finding it increasingly out of reach.
Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday’s report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job. …
More on this from the NY Post.
The fireworks had barely fizzled in the Hudson River Friday morning when a new round of celebrations took hold during a wildly gyrating day on Wall Street.
The jobs report had a “robust” 195,000 new positions created last month as the unemployment rate held steady at 7.6 percent. Hallelujah!
Unfortunately, the problem that has stunted any green shoots in jobs recovery persisted in June and shows no signs of abating.
The problem continues to be that a huge swath of the jobs being created are part-time or temporary.
Is a job really a job if it’s only for a few weeks, or if workers have to show up every morning to see if there is temporary work that day? Should one part-time job be counted the same as a full-time position? …
The Atlantic lets us know what liberals think of the job numbers.
Another month, another jobs report that’s good, but not quite good enough.
Employers beat expectations in June by adding 195,000 new workers to their payrolls. Thanks to the government’s data revisions, we know they added 195,000 in May as well, and 199,000 in April (as shown in the Washington Post graph below). Over the past year, we’ve averaged 191,000 per month. Over the past 6 months, we’ve averaged 202,000. We’re nothing if not consistent.
Which means we’ve still got a long slog ahead
Unemployment is still hovering at 7.6 percent, unchanged this month thanks to an influx of new workers into the labor force. Brookings projects that we’ll still be above 7 percent by the end of the year. Meanwhile, there are still 2 million fewer workers on U.S. payrolls than at our pre-crash peak. If you assume we’ll keep adding jobs at our 6-month average pace, we’re looking at 10 to 11 months before we get back to where things were before the market fell apart.
When you account for new workers entering the labor market, the Hamilton Project projects it will still take us more than 7 years to get back to full employment at our current pace — assuming we miraculously avoid hitting another recession during that time. …
Jennifer Rubin thinks the part time employment and the climate push are related.
The addition of 195,000 non-farm payroll jobs (plus upward revisions in past months) is nothing to sneeze at. It is some confirmation that sequester has not sent the economy careening, as the White House warned. But the biggest story here is the part-time unemployment numbers.
The U-6 number (unemployed, part-time employed and underemployed) took a statistically alarming jump from 13.8 to 14.3 percent. Coupled with 322,000 part-time jobs and 1 million workers who abandoned the job market.
Why all this part-time employment? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is related to Obamacare, which places burdens on employers for each full-time worker. Had the Obama administration not attempted triage by delaying the employer mandate, the numbers could well have been expected to worsen (and still could).
If we want to arrest the flight from the job market and give a boost to full-time jobs, we should at the very least do no more harm. Freezing Obamacare and foregoing anti-growth climate change legislation would be helpful. Instead of raising energy costs, domestic energy development is the no-brainer move, but one the president appears incapable of adopting. …
The ABC agents’ bust and jailing of the UVA coed is back in the news according to Instapundit.
… These agents should be fired, and probably prosecuted. And if Virginia wants to move into the 21st late 20th century, it could abolish its Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
UPDATE: Reader Karl Bock writes: “Besides getting us pretty riled up here in Charlottesville, this is another example of the continued nationwide trend towards the militarization of bureaucracies at the federal, state and local level. Armed ABC agents running a parking lot sting operation aimed at underaged drinkers is just calling down a potential tragedy. There is simply no reason for those guys to be armed under those circumstances. It’s not like they were raiding stills up in the hollers of Nelson County.” Indeed.