Egypt protests against Mubarak hacks running for president

It’s one thing for US oligarchs to make an ass of democracy by reducing elections to buffoonery. It’s another thing entirely for Egyptian oligarchs to pull such a stunt--in the midst of an uprising which has not ceased after a year despite killings, torture, incarcerations, disappearances, trials of thousands of protesters by the regime. Against such a revolution, you don’t pull stunts. So it’s hard to figure out what the hell military rulers in Egypt had in mind when they put disreputable Mubarak hacks in charge of the election commission & advanced a slate of candidates from the Mubarak regime, including Omar Suleiman. Suleiman is the creepy Mubarak official praised by a US diplomat as not squeamish when it came to torture, the CIA’s point man in Egypt for US rendition programs, played a leading role in in the Israeli war on Gaza, played a role in fabricating the case for US invasion of Iraq, engineered rigged elections under Mubarak, & claimed Egypt is not ready for democracy. He couldn’t win an election as dog-catcher without fraud & rigging. He entered the race using fraud since there’s no way in hell he obtained the required 30,000 signatures for candidacy in one day, even if he used the army to obtain them at gunpoint. The junta may have been testing the strength of the mass movement against military rule by putting Suleiman forward. Some think it was to make Amr Moussa, another Mubarak hack & junta candidate, look credible by comparison. Hundreds of thousands of protestors didn’t wait for this stunt to play itself out in the May elections; they showed up Saturday in Tahrir Square to oust the Mubarak officials as candidates. The next day the election commission bounced ten of the 23 presidential candidates & disqualified them as candidates. Suleiman was bounced for impropriety in signature gathering. No kidding!? (Photo by Amr Nabil/AP)