When Hosni Mubarak was wheeled in to his courtroom cage the other day, gasping out his not-guilty plea from his sickbed-behind-bars as his son tried to shield him from the cameras, Egypt seemed to have produced the ultimate photo-op of revolutionary upheaval: the pharaoh brought low before the people's tribunal. But I couldn't help thinking about an unlikely character: Russia's strongman leader Vladimir Putin. While the Middle East struggled to absorb the meaning of how quickly its mighty had fallen, Putin was busy contemplating a return to the Russian presidency, posing with scantily clad girls and trashing the United States for "living like a parasite off the global economy." If it seemed like a line out a Soviet script, well, it was.
Where revolutions start is not always where they end up.
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