President Mubarak, Meet General Custer

To get things started, this is just one reaction to Homeboy Hosni's performance last night.

And, the Al-Jazeera live blog now underway...

A few questions come to mind, like, 'What the hell was he thinking? Just how senile is he?, (and) Who the hell let him on the air to give that speech? Did he write that drivel himself?'

There's a real problem with a life of unbroken successes: Humility, sweet humility, gained by failure, is never garnered. The one thing most needed, especially by those who lead, is absent when most needed. It is the raw material of tragedy: Greek, Shakespearean, and contemporary.

It's what got Custer and all his men killed that day. He'd never even lost a skirmish along the way in his storied career; and he knew better than his junior officers, and his non-coms, and his scouts, all of whom knew that the entire Sioux nation had gathered for the sole purpose of gathering his blond scalp. And no one dared disobey, or confront, or pull their unit out of the line. It was 'do or die', and sure enough, they all died.

OS once visited the site of the battle, and was immediately struck with the thought, 'What kind of idiot would lead his troops out into this exposed position, even without the entire Sioux nation on the warpath?' And OS is no military guy, a civilian to the core. It was that obvious. To everyone except George Armstrong Custer.

So, as OS retires to bed this evening, knowing that a tragedy is unfolding before the eyes of the world, he plans to say an extra prayer of thanks for all those failures he's experienced and survived. He prays for all those kids with their educations, their hopes, and their mobile devices, flooding the streets of Cairo. He has kids that age, and it's hard to watch. A number of them won't survive the weekend, likely, and moms and dads will have children to bury next week.

And, he prays for an extra teaspoon of humility in his morning coffee.