Egyptian-Arab Winter

As surely as the Arab spring happened, the seasons will continue to change and it looks like the Egyptians will see winter before many of their co-religionists.  Before you sneer at the bumbling attempts at self government made by many middle eastern nations, it behooves us to stare into the NSA abyss revealed by Edward Snowden.  From complicit congressmen and senators who abdicated their oversight responsibility to secret courts who reinterpreted laws in such a way as to negate the stated intent, our democracy has not distinguished itself in recent weeks.  We spend time arguing about the direction our government is going and tugging the wheel right and left.  It turns out the people's representatives are not even in the driver's seat.  The courts and the elements of the executive branch are making decisions we will have to take responsibility for in the long run.  There are good people in Congress, but too many are held hostage by increasingly irrelevant ideologies while the reins of government slip through our fingers.  If we are not careful, the Arabs will be holding us up as an example of a failed democratic experiment.