President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are again showing that they're more concerned with maintaining an ally in Egypt, no matter how repressive, than honoring the wishes of the Egyptian people for democracy and self-determination.
In this, they're reverting to form.
At the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, Obama and Clinton were careful not to endorse the calls for Mubarak to step down. Then they raised their rhetoric.
It was just a week that Obama said "an orderly transition must be meaningful, must be peaceful and it must begin now." And his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, followed that up the next day by saying, "When we said 'now,' we meant 'yesterday.'"
Well, today "now" means seven months from now.
And "transition" means to another government equally as pliant as Mubarak was, and perhaps equally as bloody.
The favorite appears to be Mubarak's new vice president, Omar Suleiman, who was head of Egypt's spy agency.
According to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Suleiman served as Washington's "point man in Egypt for rendition."
And he's also a favorite of the Israelis, who were in daily contact with him when he was leading Egypt's notoriously brutal intelligence agency.
If Obama and Clinton succeed in installing Suleiman at the top, they will be negating the wishes and desecrating the courage of the Egyptian people.
It's looking more and more like standard operating procedure.
If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story "Mubarak's Thuggery Was OK Off Camera."
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