Thomas Friedman, writing today about Mubarak, says,
He had no vision, no high aspiration, no will for great educational attainment. He just had this wildly exaggerated sense of Egypt’s greatness based on the past. That is why I feel sorry for those Egyptians now clamoring to get back money they claim the Mubaraks stole. That is surely a crime, if true, but Mubarak is guilty of a much bigger, more profound, theft: all the wealth Egypt did not generate these past 30 years because of the poverty of his vision and the incompetence of his cronies.
We could already say pretty much the same thing about GW Bush (with the difference being that the money siphoned to crony corporations like Halliburton was in the main not stolen, just wasted legally). How long before we are saying something similar (minus the personal enrichment) about Obama?
