dmd.hashw

The Muslim Brotherhood was the foundation of al-Qaeda and collaborated with the Nazis in WWII. It is regularly tied to violence against Coptics in Egypt and supports a single Islamic state in the Middle East ruled by Sharia law, etc.

Shouldn’t worry, yeah right. 

Along with nearby protesters I fled down the street before stopping at what appeared to be a safe distance. A few ordinarily dressed young men were running in my direction. Two came towards me and threw out punches, sending me to the ground. I was hauled back up by the scruff of the neck and dragged towards the advancing police lines.

My captors were burly and wore leather jackets – up close I could see they were amin dowla, plainclothes officers from Egypt’s notorious state security service. All attempts I made to tell them in Arabic and English that I was an international journalist were met with more punches and slaps; around me I could make out other isolated protesters receiving the same brutal treatment and choking from the teargas.

We were hustled towards a security office on the edge of the square. As I approached the doorway of the building other plainclothes security officers milling around took flying kicks and punches at me, pushing me to the floor on several occasions only to drag me back up and hit me again. I spotted a high-ranking uniformed officer, and shouted at him that I was a British journalist. He responded by walking over and punching me twice. “Fuck you and fuck Britain,” he yelled in Arabic.

I think this stands as another reminder that the strategy of Senate Republicans during the past two years was politically brilliant. As you may recall, Mitch McConnell got a lot of attention last month because he frankly acknowledged that Republicans made a calculated decision to deny Obama bipartisan support for his proposals in service of a grand political objective:

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

Today’s Gallup poll, I think, reveals anew why this insight of McConnell’s was so crucial. What McConnell was really saying here is that if any Republicans signed on to Obama’s proposals, it risked suggesting to the American people that Obama’s governing approach was moderate or even somewhat centrist — something that could command some agreement. By contrast, when no Republicans signed on to Obama’s proposals it made it far easier for them to paint Obama’s agenda as ideologically off the rails to the left, which is exactly what they did.

If no Republicans were willing to sign on to Obama’s proposals, that had to indicate that something was seriously amiss and that there was cause for real alarm about the overreaching nature of his agenda, right? And judging by the outcome of the midterms, this strategy worked.