Meet Egypt’s President

This article is absolutely right. Morsi is no revolutionary angel. This election was a choice between two very un-good things:

“Morsy is considered one of the conservative voices within Egypt’s oldest Islamist organization. His power put him in confrontation with the group’s progressive youth on several occasions.

When the group issued its political platform in 2007, some young brothers had decried on the blogosphere three controversial clauses that denied women and Copts the right to run for president and stipulated that laws should be vetted by a board of religious scholars.

In a bid to contain the outrage of the organization’s young activists, Morsy sat down with these bloggers. However, his discourse alienated them further.

According to Ayyash, a 22-year-old blogger who attended the meeting, Morsy said in a firm tone: “This is how we think and this is how we understand Islam.” After the revolution, the group dropped the three clauses.

Last year, the tension between Morsy and the group’s youths intensified as the latter became overtly defiant of the leaders’ commands.

The revolution emboldened many young brothers and prompted them to challenge the leaders’ orders on several occasions during the 18-day-uprising that culminated in Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Young brothers had refused orders not to take to the streets on 25 January 2011 and to withdraw from the square during the Battle of the Camel.”

He’s a conservative bore, a compliant organizational man, and an Islamist ideologue, and I hope he only lasts one term.

But at least he wasn’t Mubarak’s Prime Minister as protestors were being gunned down in the streets.

It’s all hypothetical for me, because I can’t vote in Egypt. But what shifted me from “damned if I’d vote for either of these two” to “better vote anti-Mubarak no matter what” was the tenor of the recent court decisions, which brought us back to the abyss of open military fascism. (And we’re not free of that danger yet. But at least now there’s a chance of slow movement away from that.)