Serious Times Call for Serious Men

Serious times call for serious men, not the dilettantes of Washington posturing for their sycophants in the media.   Here is Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal laying out the position of serious people on Egypt:

On the subject of Egypt: Is it the U.S. government's purpose merely to cop an attitude? Or does it also intend to have a policy? 

An attitude "deplores the violence" and postpones a military exercise, as President Obama did from Martha's Vineyard the other day....

An attitude is a gorgeous thing. It is a vanity accountable to a conscience. But an attitude has no answer for what the U.S. does with or about Egypt once the finger has been wagged and the aid withdrawn....

Or we could have a policy, which is never gorgeous. It is a set of pragmatic choices between unpalatable alternatives designed to achieve the most desirable realistic result. What is realistic and desirable?...  

Politics in Egypt today is a zero-sum game: Either the military wins, or the Brotherhood does. If the U.S. wants influence, it needs to hold its nose and take a side. 

As it is, the people who now are most convinced that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim aren't tea party mama grizzlies. They're Egyptian secularists. To persuade them otherwise, the president might consider taking steps to help a government the secularists rightly consider an instrument of their salvation. Gen. Sisi may not need shiny new F-16s, but riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets and Taser guns could help, especially to prevent the kind of bloodbaths the world witnessed last week. 

It would be nice to live in a world in which we could conduct a foreign policy that aims at the realization of our dreams—peace in the Holy Land, a world without nuclear weapons, liberal democracy in the Arab world. A better foreign policy would be conducted to keep our nightmares at bay: stopping Iran's nuclear bid, preventing Syria's chemical weapons from falling into terrorist hands, and keeping the Brotherhood out of power in Egypt. But that would require an administration that knew the difference between an attitude and a policy.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt is correctly hammering Senator Lindsey Graham for calling for a cutoff of aid to the Egyptian regime because they have cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, in light of the Muslim Brotherhood's attacks on Coptic Christians.    As I've said previously, if America won't stand against a group committed to a genocide against Christians -- and there are more than 10 million Copts in Egypt -- what exactly will we stand against?