Mubarak : "Hello, I Must Be Going"

Hello, I must be going, I cannot stay, I came to say, I must be going.  I'm glad I came, but just the same I must be going.... I'll stay a week or two, I'll stay the summer thru, but I am telling you, I must be going.

 There was great anticipation and hope today that President Mubarak was finally prepared to resign his post. With hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered to celebrate his departure, Mubarak gave a televised speech in which, contrary to reports and all reason, he refused to step down.  The New Yorker's David Remnick put it well:  "The delusions of dictators are never more poignant—or more dangerous—than when they are in their death throes. To watch Hosni Mubarak today in his late-night speech in Cairo, as he used every means of rhetorical deflection to delay his inevitable end, was to watch a man so deluded, so deaf to the demands of history, that he was incapable of hearing an entire people screaming in his ear."

The push-pull of the inevitable end of Mubarak's reign reminds me of a song from the the 1930 Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers.  So, for some comic relief from the heart-rending events in Egypt, here is Groucho Marx with "Hello, I Must Be Going":