Look, I'm not trying to big a dick as I have already said your post was great (except that last part). But other than the headline of this podcast you referenced, everything in it contradicts your points regarding "bubble" and commodities, as it was a lot fundamental driven. I urge you to re-listen to it paying attention to details and not to the "headline".
To your defense, they did mention once that the rise in food prices could have been an aggravating factor. Fine. But you (and that show) are missing forest for the trees. You didn't see uprising in developed world countries due to same rise in prices, did you? Why is that? The side effect of the regimes is that their economies are what they are and it always leads to instability.
And finally let me make my last and most important point here, something that 99,9% of people living in Western world (including otherwise awesome NPR) will never get it unless they lived under the regime (heck, they don't even truly understand what it is to be living in a centrally planned economy). They can imagine so but it's not the same thing. So, at the end of the day, these people were rising up against their oppressive authoritarian regimes for reasons more important than the price of food or general wealth gap. It would be highly offensive and disrespectful to those that fought and died in all those uprisings. And this is no different from Tiananmen Square Massacre, many deadly uprisings in (partially Soviet controlled) Eastern European countries before 1989.
