I’ve made a point of including the anti-Obama banners brandished by Egypt’s revolutionaries in every post I’ve written on the fall of the Morsi regime, because I had a suspicion the mainstream media wouldn’t be showing people that stuff. I was right.
Mohammed Morsi may be deposed, but Barack Obama’s palace guard in the press is still up and running, and they really don’t want their viewers to dwell on just how much the Cairo man on the street personally blames Obama (and US ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson) for installing and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood’s man. The Examiner notes that on the CNN and CNN International Facebook pages, “many Egyptians are expressing their outrage over the slanted media coverage in Egypt, as well as their animosity against President Obama.”
The Examiner throws in a tirade from an Egyptian woman living in Canada that concludes with a demand for Obama to “please remove your black witch Patterson from here because she is not welcome here.” By “here” she presumably means Egypt, not Canada, and she means “black witch” in the same sense that Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter series was a black witch, because Anne Patterson is white, as you can see from all those “Obama & Patterson support terrorism in Egypt” banners the media doesn’t want to show you.
Patterson might soon be more welcome in Canada than in the U.S., as Foreign Policy reports the “knives are coming out” for her in Washington:
Patterson in particular resisted opportunities to criticize the Morsy government as it implemented increasingly authoritarian policies. In a memorable May interview with the Egyptian English-language news sit Ahram Online, she repeatedly dodged pointed questions about Morsy’s leadership. “The fact is they ran in a legitimate election and won,” she said. “Of course it is challenging to be dealing with any new government. However, at the state institutional level, we are for instance still liaising with the same military and civil service personnel, and thus have retained the same long-established relations.”
Republicans from Texas Senator Ted Cruz to House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce have pounced on statements like these, increasingly seeing Patterson as the key implementer for a policy that at least offers tacit support to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“As opposition to Morsy coalesced around the Tamarod movement, the Obama administration missed the opportunity to support its efforts and further the vital interests of the United States without firing a shot,” Cruz wrote in a Wednesday article for FP. “Instead, the sole priority seems to be to defuse the situation and preserve the status quo. Ambassador Patterson has assumed the leading role in implementing this policy, meeting with members of the opposition not to encourage them to pursue a true secular democracy in Egypt but to try to persuade them to tone things down.”
Incompetent officials generally “fail up” in the Obama Administration – her Benghazi lies were a huge resume enhancer for Susan Rice – and sure enough, Patterson is said to be in line for a promotion to Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Wait until the angry Egyptians get wind of that. CNN will have to work hard to avoid relaying their reaction to American viewers.