"Democracy is hard," Hillary Clinton said when she met with President Mohammed Morsi in July 2012. "It requires dialogue and compromise and real politics.
According to the Guardian:
In a series of moves, President Morsi has used the nearly absolute authority he assumed last August to try to put that absolute authority beyond reach, at least on a temporary basis.
He may very well succeed. The potential opponents to his move are legion, but they are also divided and many are politically clueless. By careful timing and a series of carrots for various actors, Morsi may have outmaneuvered any opposition. Internationally, he has just won plaudits for his role in ending the fighting between Israel and Hamas; that likely offers him a bit of insulation from international criticism and some vague domestic capital for showing Egypt's centrality.
I posted a cartoon history of the pre- and post Egypt's Arab Spring events in my blog at
Immizen.com as a way to reflect on the difficulty of establishing a Democratic system in nations that are not accustomed to it.
And I was thinking, Democracy in America is not perfect, but we do not see these power grabs or coup d’etat, and it is through democratic elections that we decide who becomes president. And we’ve come a long way from the times when only white men who were property owners were permitted to vote.
Some people in the US may not be happy that Obama won and may want to secede from the US. Perhaps they fear that Obama may attempt a power grab, but someone should tell them to relax. Someone should tell them to be proud that in the US, with the exception of Republican vote suppression, SuperPACs, Fox News propaganda and big corporations meddling in the elections, we have a healthy democracy that for the most part works pretty well (if we forget about the filibuster for a moment).
Or perhaps, someone should tell these people to go live in Egypt for a while.