OMAR SULEIMAN IS YOUR NEW OLYMPIA SNOWE

(UPDATE: Or perhaps not -- looks as if Mubarak is really gone now.)

The Obama administration, always hoping that someone in the middle -- or who claims to be in the middle -- will magically bridge the differences and make all the tension go away:

...The chaotic events on Thursday called much of the administration's strategy in dealing with the Egyptian crisis into question. For days, the administration has pinned its hopes on a transition process managed by the Egyptian vice president, Omar Suleiman. But Mr. Suleiman followed Mr. Mubarak on television, aligning himself squarely with his boss, urging the protesters to decamp, go back to work and stop watching foreign satellite TV channels. That extravagant show of loyalty may doom any chances for Mr. Suleiman to function as an honest broker in the transition -- something on which the administration had been counting, in part because it has good relations with Mr. Suleiman, a former head of Egyptian intelligence.

"The administration had been looking toward Suleiman to handle the orderly part of the orderly transition," said Martin S. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. "But this week, he raised doubts about whether he had made the conversion to a democrat. And now Mubarak has dragged Suleiman down with him, in the eyes of the protesters."

Suleiman is to Mubarak what Olympia Snowe is to Mitch McConnell? More or less, right? In any case, Lucy yanks the football away again.