Egypt this morning

How can this end well?  Frankly speaking it cannot.

Just as a cautionary tale before we jump to take sides over cocktails and water cooler discussions, what if that scene were in New York City?

Let's imagine that the Tea Party goes crazy(ier) and takes to the streets. In NYC you can always get a few thousand folks to line up about anything so in Grant Park there forms a bunch of these people.  The gathering swells and the demand is that the mayor step down or the President resigns. The crowd won't go away and they want what they want and continue agitating to the point where it isn't just a few thousand but perhaps 100,000 or more all heated up about a multitude of issues - and we all have them or one of them - so that THE ONLY SOLUTION that satisfies everyone - the common denominator - is to change the government that is the root cause.

Fearing civil war in New York, the police come into break it up but they are simply out manned.  They are also loath to fight their fellow citizens.  The New York National Guard would appear next but most of them are abroad fighting other wars so we go federal or something.  The point is that a standing government cannot sit still when the opposition to it reaches a certain boiling point.  It can't.  It must meet the mob in some way with some resources. From the outside we can judge the mob as good or bad, right or wrong.  From the inside however, it is a mob and the opposition to government that is, right or wrong, THE government.

It Mubarak resigns then the solution will come, by default, from the mob.  Cooler heads don't prevail against a mob as the mob is made up of a bazillion individuals who have their individual gripes and bitches and it is almost never homogenized, so it is unlikely that there will be one solution to put things right.

It is a mess.  It will not end well.