Yes and President Bush did absolutely nothing to head this off. I heard Tony Snow on the radio this morning. He said he couldn't get ANY senior administration official to come on his show and explain what you've quoted from the USA Today article above.

The President has explained it repeatedly.

Rick: This issue just moved past rationality too fast. Too many people had staked out an extreme and completely unsupportable position; it would have been humiliating to back down.

OJ: It wasn't just lefty opportunism. This is perfectly consistent with any number of things the left believes, including that once you know someone's ethnicity, you know everything important about him.

David:

Sadly, the far Right believes that too.

I just think it would be nice if the President would have some people down in the trenches to do the scut work for him. I understand that, as President, he should only have to explain things once and that should be it. After all, he's the President, not a schoolmarm. But where were the administration people on the Sunday talk shows or talking to Congresspeople or any one of a number of things that they could have been doing on this issue (and about a dozen others) but weren't? Why does the President continualy rely on his extremely low-level supporters (like you and me) to do all the heavy lifting for his administration? It's one of the more irritating things I find about this administration.

It's as if the President is standing on the mound in a ballgame, but is refusing to throw a ball because he feels he's too good for the game. Well, what is he doing there? He's suited up and stretched and he's on the mound, so throw something, dammit. He shouldn't expect the batboys to do it for him and he shouldn't have gotten into politics if he was unwilling to play politics.

Bryan:

If you recall the sequence of events, they were all on the Sunday shows defending it a couple weekends ago but then the issue blew up on them. Once it got manic there was no defusing it.

A casualty of the cartoons - but

Americans are paying attention almost 5 years on.

That is good. We know what's coming and are mentally preparing for it.

Sandy:

If people think Dubai is the enemy and that this helps we've lost ground, not gained.

Sandy: Paying attention to what? Huge numbers of ports are run by foreign companies, many from the Middle East & China. This story blew up because a desperate company hired a lobbyist to find some Congressman (Schumer) willing to scream xenophobic nonsense for potential short-term political gain. It's yet more evidence that the government and media are dominated by deeply unserious pinheads.

b,

I see you see this the way I see it. I'm just waiting now for Continental Stevedoring & Terminals to be the announced company.

I would also love to see Michelle Malkin "unhinge" her way out of this when it's announced that this same company will end up getting a federal subsidy for running the ports:) Which is what will happen when they overpay Dubai Ports World for the contracts.

David:

"This issue just moved past rationality too fast."

Agreed and that is to my point. People in logistics knew this proposed deal was in the pipeline late last year and didn't much care because they knew the facts. Where was any groundwork done (ie, briefings to Congressional leaders)? Where were the stories about who managed our terminals prior to this deal's announcement? The administration has been totally reactive when it needed to be proactive.

OJ:

After the fact and too little, too late. Gotta due more than say they'll been helpful. If it hasn't run on the nightly news or written in the first couple paragraphs of a front page newspaper story, people just don't know the facts.

love this gem:

"People in the UAE think they're America's friends."

yeah, they sure do. i bet the man on the arab street is just outraged by this port fiasco. outraged! what with the great satan snubbing the palestinians, invading the holy soil of iraq, and now this!?

Rick;

Yes, the explanation followed the stupidity, rather than preceded it. no one can anticipate this level of stupidity.

OJ:

That level of stupidity would have been easy to anticipate by asking a few people, especially when what - 8 out of 10 - oppose the deal. Explanations don't matter after the story line has quickly set in. Remember, the MSM is still calling the NSA program a domestic spy program even though it's been explained many times that it's not. I must confess a "W-T-Heck" moment when I first heard about it and I consider myself fairly well informed. Not as informed as some here, but more than Joe Blow.

I bow to no one in my overall support and admiration for what Bush it trying to accomplish in his Presidency, but he whiffed this one badly.

rick t

i agree and then some. this was political imbecility at its finest.

Yeah! Just like that outbreak of sudden acceleration accidents a few years ago was the government's fault for not realizing that drivers would jam on the gas instead of the break. It's all the government's fault. Doesn't it know how stupid we are? Stupid government!

Rick:

Here's a pretty easy exercise for you: pick the next totally trivial thing that you think will become the all-consuming passion of talk radio cranks? Remember, it has to be so inherently meaningless that it provokes that what the heck shrug, but at the same time you have to recognize that 80% of your fellow citizens will think it threatens the existence of the planet. You have 15 minutes to complete the assignment. Go....

The Brake.

National ID cards.