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HUBBA Award Goes to Fareed Zakaria
The coveted We Meant Well HUBBA Award (Head Up Butt Bozo Award) this week goes to CNN’s plagiarizer Fareed Zakaria, for his Op-Ed failing to understand events in the Middle East almost completely while still repeating the US Government standard lines almost verbatim like a loyal robo-journalist should.
Fareed starts us off with a really useful factoid:
In Libya, the government is not fomenting Anti-Americanism, it is fighting it, openly declaring America an ally and friend. The country is pro-American by a 2-to-1 margin, and the violence there appears to have been the work of small, extremist elements that lack much popular support.
Libyan government not to blame, small group of isolated ruffians, right on Susan Rice’s talking points. And good news America, Libyans love us 2:1! Now, that does leave a full third of the country that does not love us, and it appears the loving two thirds are willing to at least quietly and passively allow the others to run wild, and of course even a small mob burning down your Consulate and killing your Ambassador counts as burning down your Consulate and killing your Ambassador. It reminds me of General Giap’s famous response after the Vietnam War, when some American General said “Your troops never beat us on the open battlefield,” to which Giap replied “True, but also irrelevant.”
Fareed doubles down on his idiotic argument:
Across the Middle East, there have been protests railing against the United States and the West in general. Even in these places, however, keep in mind that these crowds number in the hundreds – perhaps thousands – in countries with tens of millions of people. They make for vivid images, but they do not tell the whole story.
Yeah, right. Maybe we should relocate the US Embassies from the neighborhoods where people don’t like us into those better parts of town.
As for the violence in Egypt, Fareed sees it pretty much as the guys blowing off some steam, a lot like Dappy Don Rumsfeld claimed during the Iraq Civil War that “well, democracy can be messy.” Anyway, the fact that the Egyptian government seems powerless to stop the riots is just smart politics. Says Fareed:
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy is an elected politician, and he is trying to pander, appease, direct and guide people. I wish he were bolder and fought the extremist elements in his society head-on. But let’s face it, he’s behaving like an elected politician.
Sure, just like an elected politician. Just like elected politicians in say, Western Europe behave around mobs?
And to wrap things up, a little self-congratulatory music:
And let’s be honest, there is a cancer of extremism in the Arab world, one that was diagnosed extensively after 9/11 by many, including me.
So, for his contribution to pointless rhetoric, we award the HUBBA to Fareed Zakaria of CNN! We also congratulate our runner-up, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who said, “The [Middle East] protests were as unreflective of popular Middle Eastern opinion as ‘a Ku Klux Klan demonstration’ in the United States.”
(The HUBBA committee acknowledges the many lame persons in contention for this award, and has told me that choosing just one was, as always, very difficult. They hasten to add that in weeks where no HUBBA announcement is made, the award is by default passed on to US UN Ambassador Susan Rice.)
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