a joke and two non-jokes

“There were even moments of humor in a country with a well-deserved reputation for it. Protesters joked that the defining chant of the protests — ‘The people want the overthrow of the government’ — had become ‘The people want to understand the speech.'”

But from the same article:

“Can this man be serious or did he lose his mind?” asked George Ishak, a longtime opposition leader. “People will not go home and tomorrow will be a horrible day. It is a redundant speech, it is annoying and we heard it a thousand times before.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, an opposition leader and Nobel laureate, was blunter. “I ask the army to intervene immediately to save Egypt,” he wrote on his Twitter feed. “The credibility of the army is being put to the test.”