Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Chicken, meet roost


White House photo by Kimberlee Hewitt

When you endorse "pro-democracy" street protests as a legitimate way of changing a government, you can't then be surprised when there's a round 2 of these things where you might be in a more awkward position. Whether it's Benazir (in a typical stunt) promising to lead a march from Lahore to Islamabad, or Georgians fed up with what their Rose Revolution brought them (in the form of Mikhail Saakashvili, above), or Hezbollah in Lebanon. There's more to democracy than opportunistic branding and support of one particular faction that at a point in time look like the right people to be in charge.

UPDATE: An almost parody of the above line of protestor-choosing by Powerline's Hindrocket --

Georgia is a very different case. That country's government is pro-western and progressive; it accuses Russian intelligence agencies of coordinating the protests in an effort to destabilize, and re-assert control over, Georgia. My guess is that's probably true, and the protesters are, essentially, the bad guys.

No comments: