In the end, if Obama truly wants to install Suleiman, he probably can. He’ll engineer one of those “make me do it” moments, where he just has to accept that the thing his administration has been working tirelessly to achieve is the best thing for Egypt. But the minute that happens, and the stories start leaking out about young demonstrators being “disappeared” by Suleiman’s thugs, he’ll have to explain to the social media generation how it was all worth it for “stability in the region.”

And this time, he won’t be able to blame it on the need for “60 votes.”

The US media and political establishment – increasingly a redundancy – told me that Omar Suleiman was managing the transition in Egypt very well, and talking to the opposition groups, and that progress was being made and life was returning to normal and we can all put this out of our heads presently. Somebody forgot to send the message to the people of Egypt.

How could the State Department have been so stupid as not to see that Hamas would win a democratic election in Gaza in 2006? Maybe a certain Egyptian told them not to worry about it.

There’s a concerted effort on the part of Western media to show that Cairo is normal again, with slices of life that sidestep Tahrir Square. Businesses and banks opened their doors. People returned to their jobs and to drinking tea. Everything has returned to balance.

By and large, the Obama Administration response to this admittedly difficult challenge has been not-horrible. But both Frank Wisner’s selection as envoy (which would have been horrible even without the Patton Boggs connection, given his ties to his daddy’s coup-happy CIA, Enron, and AIG) and Hillary’s outspoken support for Omar Suleiman were unforced errors.

While this video of the shooting of an unarmed man in the streets of Alexandria circulated online, the mainstream western headlines were full of rather fishy talk about the meeting between Vice President Omar Suleiman and “the opposition.” And in the U.S., both President Obama in his interview with Bill O’Reilly, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been making comments as conflicted as before.

The key to understanding Omar Suleiman’s statement claiming there is “consensus” in how to move forward in Egypt is to see how he redefines the crisis from being caused by legitimate grievances voiced by the “youth” involved in protests into a lack of security caused by the protests.

At a security conference in Munich today, Hillary Clinton announced that America’s torturer, Omar Suleiman, must be in charge of Egypt’s “transition” to “democracy.”

“The US secretary of state Hillary Clinton today signaled how far the US has swung its support behind vice-president Omar Suleiman and the transition process he is leading in Egypt.”

One of the main narratives emerging in coverage of the violence that plagued Egypt’s popular uprising on Wednesday and Thursday is that the Interior Ministry is primarily responsible, as seen for example in the CNN video here. We heard from Al Jazeera English on Thursday that Egypt’s attorney general has banned former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly from leaving the country and has frozen his assets. In this post, I provide some background on the Interior Ministry and how its 1.4 million employees are deployed. But one should not assume that the Interior Ministry is the only other problem once Mubarak is gone. As Jane Mayer has pointed out in detail, Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is now being openly discussed by the US government as the leader of a potential interim government should Mubarak step down, has been the primary conduit for CIA renditions to Egypt for torture.

As I said last week, The Party Line is my attempt to take the ideas and thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head all week, and use them to kick off a weekend’s worth of conversation, and,well, my thoughts were a little extra bouncy today. There was just so much this week, and so much to say about Egypt all by itself, that I had a hard time editing my thoughts. . . but stick with me because, as you can see by the tags, I also talk about sex.