Thanks be to "UP with Chris Hayes" for being the only Sunday outlet willing to take the time to have a nuanced and informed discussion on what's happening in Egypt. When newly elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi took advantage of the wave of world admiration for helping to broker a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel to declare that there would be no challenges to his presidency, there was a collective gulp in the media. Were we looking at yet another ruthless dictator-for-life in an area that was just starting to sow the seeds of democracy? Looking for signs of dissent, the media reported that Egypt's supreme judicial council condemned the action and the all-important stock market plummeted. From Foreign Policy blog:

Had Morsi stopped there, there would have been a clear narrative of a pragmatic, effective new Egyptian government. But of course, he did not. Instead, he made his unprecedented bid to centralize power in the office of the Presidency, a bold Calvinball move redefining the rules of the game in mid-play which immediately ignited a new political crisis. Opposition politicians ceased their bickering for the moment to unify around a denunciation of the power grab. A larger than normal crowd descended on Tahrir and protest broke out around the country, along with depressingly familiary violent clashes between security forces and the opposition. Meanwhile, Muslim Brotherhood supporters mobilized in counter-demonstrations. Rumors ran wild about coming moves to prosecute political enemies, purge the media, and more.

A case could have been made for Morsi's Constitutional Decree had he not pushed it too far. The judiciary has played an erratic, unpredictable and politicized role throughout the transition, with its controversial decisions such as the dissolution of Parliament. Its Calvinball approach to the rules, in the absence of either a Constitution or a political consensus, introduced enormous and unnecessary uncertainty into the transition and badly undermined the legitimacy of the process. Morsi was not the only one who despaired of Cairo's political polarization and institutional gridlock. But none of that can justify his assertion of executive immunity from oversight or accountability, declaring his decisions "final and binding and cannot be appealed in any way or to any entity." And then there was Article VI, asserting the power to do literally anything "to protect the country and the goals of the revolution." That Morsi was elected has nothing to do with his attempt to place himself above the law. Nor does the expiration date of his extraordinary powers (after Parliamentary elections and the Constitutional referendum) reassure in the slightest. The pushback which is now taking place on the streets and in the courthouse and in the public sphere is exactly what needs to happen, even if the increasing turn towards existential opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood rather than toward specific political issues is disturbing. For all the polarization and ugliness of the street clashes, this intense engagement with politics and unwillingness to accept Morsi's diktat are positive signs of the vitality of Egypt's vibrant, ornery and contentious new politics. It shows yet again that there is no going back to the old patterns of Egyptian or Arab politics.

It's ridiculous and arrogant to predict at this point how these events will resolve. Then truth of the matter is that Egypt is a nation without a rule of law at this point and Morsi's actions may indeed be the stop-gap he claims as a new constitution is being written. But moreover, any interference by the US to fight the notion of dictatorial powers for Morsi may end up giving us the exact opposite result that we want. The Egyptian people are fighting for democracy on their own. But like the Iranians who re-elected Ahmadinejad after he was declared one of the "axis of evil", the Egyptians will not likely sit still for American interference and will view us--not a dictator--as the force to fight.

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When last we heard from neo-McCarthyite and confirmed crazy person Allen West (R-FL), he was claiming that half of the Democratic caucus in the House were communists. Now, he's claiming the Muslim Brotherhood is pulling the strings at the Pentagon.

“We have to understand that when tolerance becomes a one-way street it leads to cultural suicide,” West told "Fox and Friends" on Monday. “We should not allow the Muslim Brotherhood or associated groups to be influencing our national strategy.”

When asked if he believed those groups were influencing U.S. strategy, West responded, “Oh, absolutely,” and cited the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting report that didn’t mention the suspect’s Muslim faith as a potential motive for the killings.

So far, the Muslim Brotherhood has gotten Obama to surge in Afghanistan, increase Predator strikes in the entire region, send the Special Forces into Pakistan to kill bin Laden -- and launch an air war Libya. They're very sneaky!

What a nutball.

Oh, and I love that Faux News talking head said of West, "You're a guy who's trained to follow the law," when West was kicked out of the Army for breaking it.

It's a measure of how effective the Occupy Wall Street movement has become, that the right-wing feels compelled to attack them as having ties to Muslim extremists. More importantly, it's a barometer of just how frightened they are of losing the spotlight to real populism:

In a development that should surprise no one, some on the right-wing are accusing the Occupy Wall Street movement of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.“JIHAD ALERT,” the anti-“Shariah Islam” group “The United West” declares in a blog post. “‘OCCUPY ORLANDO’ or JIHAD ORLANDO?”

Tom Trento, the group’s director, explains that Occupy Orlando is a “move by a Muslim activist to take over control of ‘Occupy Orlando,’ in the ‘spirit of the Arab Spring.’” An accompanying video shows Trento attending an Occupy Orlando protest last weekend, and warning about activist Shayan Elahi, who Trento says is “associated with CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Elahi is a local Democratic activist and a Muslim civil-rights attorney who is also legal counselfor Occupy Orlando, according to My Fox Orlando.Trento writes:

Once we watched Shayan Elahi in action, running around, signing up speakers, providing direction, telling people what to do, we started to connect the dots to the stated Face Book Mission Statement of “Occupy Orlando,” which reads, “…we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.”

The John Birch Society almost over took the conservative movement during the rise of Barry Goldwater, but was beaten back by William F. Buckley and the NRO. The JBS's Robert Welch was obsessed with Communists and started multiple conspiracy theories around his delusions, including the one about Eisenhower being a Commie infiltrator.

Welch wrote in a widely circulated statement, The Politician, "Could Eisenhower really be simply a smart politician, entirely without principles and hungry for glory, who is only the tool of the Communists? The answer is yes." He went on. "With regard to ... Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason."[33]

The controversial paragraph was removed before final publication of The Politician.[34]

The sensationalism of Welch's charges against Eisenhower prompted several conservatives and Republicans, most prominently Goldwater and the intellectuals of William F. Buckley's circle, to renounce outright or quietly shun the group. Buckley, an early friend and admirer of Welch, regarded his accusations against Eisenhower as "paranoid and idiotic libels" and attempted unsuccessfully to purge Welch from the Birch Society.[35] From then on Buckley, who was editor of National Review, became the leading intellectual spokesman and organizer of the anti-Bircher conservatives.[36] In fact, Buckley's biographer John B. Judis wrote that "Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn rather than leading toward the kind of conservatism National Review had promoted."[36]

Using the cover of the Tea Party, the Birchers are making a huge comeback and they will find a conspiracy hidden in anything at all. Frank Gaffney gets a gold star for this one. Kudos to Think Progress:

Amidst the political upheaval in Egypt, conservatives are scare-mongering about the possible Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt. But leading neoconservative Frank Gaffney is taking Muslim Brotherhood fearmongering to new heights. This past weekend, Gaffney was a featured speaker at the Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, an annual gathering of social conservatives. Gaffney used the opportunity to discuss how the Muslim Brotherhood is not only poised to implement a new theocracy in Egypt, but is also operating in the United States under “front groups” like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil liberties group dedicated to “protecting the rights of all Americans, regardless of faith.”
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TP: Do you think [Sharia law] has already infiltrated the federal government?

GAFFNEY: There are questionable people who are sympathetic to the program of the stealth jihadists who have influence with the United States government. Some I think are actually working for it, but for sure people who are persuaded that the folks that they need to work with to reach out to the Muslim-American community, for example, who incessantly turn to Muslim Brotherhood organizations for that purpose, are a very real problem.

TP: Can you name a few names, for instance in the federal government?

GAFFNEY: John Brennan. John Brennan is the Homeland Security Advisor for the President of the United States

TP: He’s complicit in this creep of Sharia law?

GAFFNEY: He’s absolutely daft on what the nature of the threat and is insistent upon using Brotherhood-front organizations as sources of information and as vehicles for reaching out to the Muslim-American community. Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has said that these sorts of groups are “sources of wisdom,” as he puts it, to the United States government. Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is incessantly meeting with Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and I think has in the past, if not today, employed people who are associated with them.

This is sick and twisted, but as Digby noted this morning, according to the Tea Party, the Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are in cahoots.

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The Fox News faithful and the rest of the right-wing bedwetters are already hard at work trying to make the uprising in Egypt into an Islamic threat from the Muslim Brotherhood. (Not to mention their panic attacks that this will raise the price of oil. Boy, their allegiance to democracy is still as shallow as ever!)

CAIRO - The Muslim Brotherhood found its first martyr in Egypt's popular uprising Friday, when a teenager named Mustafa Sawi was shot dead in front of the Interior Ministry. But the country's oldest and best organized opposition group had to take a back seat at his public funeral the next day, as the Muslim Brotherhood insists it is little more than a bit player in the outpouring of resistance to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.

"This is on purpose," Mohammed Mahdi Akef, who retired last year as leader of the group at the age of 82, said Sunday. "We want to be part of the fabric of society."

But as Egyptian society begins to weave a whole new cloth, the Muslim Brotherhood, alternately used and demonized by Mubarak over the years, has been slow to contribute. An organization dedicated to the creation of a more thoroughly Islamic Egyptian state, and still technically illegal here, the 83-year-old group has been weakened by a generational divide and overtaken by the protests that broke out with little warning here last week.

The Muslim Brotherhood is still capable of provoking alarm here. Last week, as the protests gathered steam, many of its senior members were rounded up and put in prison.

Individual members have been active in the demonstrations, but like other political groups here it has refrained from waving its banners or promoting itself during the protests. At Sawi's funeral procession, which wound through central Tahrir Square on Saturday, there was no visible evidence of his membership.

"The moment is bigger than any individual force or actor," Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said Sunday. "The Brothers have been effectively sidelined."

The outpouring of so many different elements of society in the demonstrations has to have taught the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson, he said. "They must realize now that there's no way they represent the majority."