unintentionally hysterical comment of the week.

* Brooks on Lehrer:

"DAVID BROOKS: I would say the (election) had an effect -- psychologically liberating effect on a lot of people who were unhappy but marching to the party line. And now they're talking.

And now they're talking about radically different ideas, and they're suggesting radically different things. It's become much harder to report on the administration. It used to be you talked to one of them, you knew what they all thought. But now, no more."

unintentionally hysterical comment of the week.

* Mizgin:

"We all know that Turkey is neither secular nor a democracy; "secular democracy" is a subset of classic War on Terror® propaganda. Under this subset, Turkey becomes a sympathetic victim in the eyes of millions of ignorant people in the West. Under this argument, Turkey's a "secular democracy" becomes "threatened" by Islamists--the very same Islamists with which the Pashas negotiated a sort of power-sharing arrangement. The power-sharing arrangement conveniently permitted the Pashas (and Tansu Ciller) to arm Turkish Hezbollah from TSK installations in "The Kurdish Region," so that Turkish Hezbollah could fight PKK. Stupidly, the Pashas thought they could control Turkish Hezbollah.

It all began to spin badly out of control and a lot of Turkey's current problems (the black operations) are a result of the Pashas' efforts to regain control of the state. Naturally, the Islamists (AKP) resist because they want to control the state. The Islamists give the impression that they would be different than the Pashas, but they won't be. They can't be, because they grew up under the Pashas, the only thing they know is the Pashas, and they negotiated their official existence with the Pashas. They will be the same way.
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The Pashas' strategy of tension, "precipitating a takeover by the army," creates the justification for them to run around shrieking about how the "secular democracy" in Turkey (that doesn't exist) is in danger.
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Besides, there's always the strategy of tension to create a phony crisis. Everything that has happened since Semdinli is exactly the kind of stuff that happened before the 1980 coup. And let's be aware that the soft coup (1997) was not against an Islamist threat. The soft coup was a cover-your-ass operation because Susurluk had its roots among the Pashas and their Deep State."