Kirsten Powers: Yes, the media’s reaction to Romney’s Egypt statement yesterday was utterly insane

Via Mediaite, consider this a video complement to Erick Erickson’s piece at Red State this morning about yesterday’s virtuoso exercise in narrative-driven concern-trolling. If you only know KP from her Fox appearances, this clip will come as a surprise, as she’s as unsparing of O’s failures here as any pundit on the other side of the aisle would be. If you follow her Twitter feed, it’ll come as no surprise at all. She’s been lighting into the White House and the embassy for the past 36 hours, and in fact has lit into them frequently in the past on the topic of Egypt. She’s tweeted before too about having friends in the Copt community there, so this is no academic exercise in punditry. The stronger the Brotherhood gets, the more dangerous the situation becomes for the Copts and for the United States. Go figure that she’s more worried about the president’s reaction than Mitt Romney’s.

Speaking of the embassy, I’d sure like some more details on what this exchange is all about:

.@ikhwanweb Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those too.

— US Embassy Cairo (@USEmbassyCairo) September 13, 2012

“Ikhwanweb” is the English-language account of the Muslim Brotherhood. The embassy didn’t specify what they saw on the MB’s Arab-language feeds, but this story on Ahram Online will give you an idea:

This reconciliatory tweet, however, was posted while the Brotherhood’s Arabic-language Twitter account and its official website were both praising the protests — staged against a US-made film judged defamatory towards Islam — and calling for a million man march on Friday.

One Arabic language article on the Brotherhood’s site sported the headline ‘Egyptians rise to defend the Prophet’.

The Times of Israel has much, much more about the Brotherhood’s reaction, including their calls to criminalize insults to Islam. It’s a long tradition in the Arab world for leaders to say one thing in English for international audiences and something else entirely for domestic consumption; Arafat in particular was infamous for talking out of both sides of his mouth. If the embassy has reason to believe that the Brotherhood supports what happened yesterday, which of course it does, I sure do wish the Foreign-Policy President would share that information with the American public. Might be relevant to the question of whether Egypt is or isn’t still an “ally,” no?

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