This fruitcake tastes home-made

So farewell then, Mohamed Morsi. I usually stereotype Islamism as something a bit alien - a fundamentally different type of clownish ideology to the varieties of slapstick currently available in the First World. Juan Cole thinks it's closer to some of the familiar political currents we have in the West than we imagine:

Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, represents the equivalent of the American tea party in Egyptian politics—captive to the religious right, invested in austerity and smaller government, and contemptuous of workers and the political left.

At least the yanks and the rest of the West don't have corrupt and brutal armies on the other side, ready to seize power the moment their position is threatened - there's an old argument that this is simply because the military-industrial complex is so firmly embedded that it doesn't need to park its tanks on the White House Lawn to get its own way (although these days, people are more likely to cite the security-administrative complex or the finance-extortion complex as the arm of the shadow state that's really pulling the strings).