Dissent Crushed: Abdel Kareem, Egypt’s Free Speech Martyr

The consequences of the verdict and sentence are grave, both for Abdel Kareem and the for the Egyptian blogosphere in general.

If Abdel Kareem’s appeals are unsuccessful, he will have to spend the next four years in prison, where he could very likely get killed by an over-enthusiastic believer. His other option is to spend the next four years in solitary confinement, which won’t probably bode well for his mental health. Dead or crazy, those are his options now.

As far as the blogosphere, the implications are equally dangerous. This verdict sets a legal precedent for prosecuting someone for what they write on the Internet, on charges that are not easily defined or defended against. This could be used to prosecute any blogger the government feels like punishing, and serves a huge blow to freedom of speech in Egypt.

CK:…Hillary has been running for 20 years. Her husband that gave the keynote address at the convention in 1988, and remember when Bill ran, he said you buy one, you get one free. So she and her husband have been in the business of the presidency, organizing, laying the groundwork, for twenty years. Here she is, all of a sudden, this guy comes out of nowhere on the back of one book, two years in the Senate, and a media swoon, and she’s asking herself how is this possible, and she’s, you know, her coronation is interrupted, and her strategy has to be to challenge this guy over and over again, on whatever it is, as a way to knock him off his course. Either he fights back and then he ends up in the gutter with her, and he loses his sheen, or he runs away, and everybody says he’s weak, he doesn’t have the stomach and the fight to be a president. So it’s going to happen over and over again. This is round one, it’s a fifteen rounder.

HH: Juan, do you agree with that analysis?

JW: Yeah, I think that’s pretty wise. I mean, the difficulty here is I think Obama wants to rise above the static. He just doesn’t have the money, he doesn’t have the organization, he doesn’t have Bill Clinton and all of the people who have benefited from Clinton’s time in the White House, he doesn’t have all the political consultants who are on the payroll. So what Obama has got to do at this point is rely on momentum, and say that he is part of a new kind of American, and especially Democratic Party politics that’s not the politics of polarization, that he is simply looking to pull people together, and he wants, he has the capacity to capture the middle of the American electorate in the general election, and assure the Democrats a win. So if he gets involved in the dirty, you know, trading dirt with Hillary Clinton, that’s not to his advantage. And Geffen this week, now some people might say Geffen did that without Obama’s permission, but when he starts saying, when Geffen starts talking about the Clintons a liars, when he starts talking about Hillary as overscripted, overproduced, inauthentic, a lot of people think oh, is that Obama? And then Hillary’s people say Obama’s got to apologize. Obama’s got to return the money. Obama says no, it wasn’t me. I’m not returning anything. That’s not to Obama’s advantage, although I think if you look back over the last week or so, it’s Hillary who’s taken the shots here. I think Hillary has been damaged. I don’t know that it was so wise for her to elevate that Maureen Dowd column to the kind of height that she did by responding to it so angrily.

Neo-Neocon has some Thoughts on Hillary and other female heads of state

Hillary’s iron has been shown more in the cause of getting first her husband and then herself elected, at least so far. And she’s tainted by the brush of her own possible corruption as well as Bill Clinton’s moral failings, and her own compromises in service of his career and the preservation of their marriage.