March 18, 2006
DUBAIOUS ABOUT THE DEAL:
Arab world needs more Dubais (MARK STEYN, 3/18/06, OC Register)
How’s that Dubai ports deal going? You remember, the one where Dubai Ports World agreed to sell its U.S. port operations to an American company?"It appears," huffed Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., "that the divestiture announcement from DPW last week may have been nothing more than a diversion designed to deflect attention away from this outsourcing of American port security. Congressional action blocking this deal is the only true assurance we have that this deal is dead."
You go, girl! Tote that barge, lift that bale, git a little drunk an’ you land in Congress! Why doesn’t the House of Representatives buy the port operations with the money earmarked for prescription drugs for seniors or Hurricane Katrina "relief"? I don’t expect a busy woman like Rep. Schultz to run the new company herself – though she could certainly put in a couple of shifts at the Port of Miami each weekend – but how about that INS official who mailed Mohammed Atta his visa six months to the day after he died in an unusual flying event in Lower Manhattan? How about leaving the ports to those State Department chaps who approved the 9/11 killers’ laughably incomplete paperwork ("Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA")? Or how about those officials at FAA headquarters who on the morning of 9/11 found it all a little too much and just walked out of the room?
After all, all those guys are still working for the U.S. government. By golly, if we’re gonna have security breaches at American ports, let’s make sure they’re all-American security breaches!
If you did a poll right now, 90% of the 60% of folks who got whipped up about this farce would wear the ports had already been turned over to the Coast Guard to run.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 18, 2006 6:01 PM
They could always turn them over to the Chinese -- hardly anyone in Congress cared about the Long Beach port deal.
Posted by: John at March 18, 2006 10:53 PMWould the Right get this roiled if the longshoreman's union tried to "buy" the ports?
Would the Left get this roiled if the Indonesians did?
Posted by: ratbert at March 19, 2006 2:35 AMMan, don't you guys ever get it? This was about politics. It was political idiocy to make this deal, especially once it flashed into a national story. It's handing one of the Repubs biggest strengths, national defense, to the Demos for the Nov election. There are enough facts about UAE and Bin Laden to flip the House to the Dems. That's a different reality than the actual security at the ports, but it's still a reality.
Hey, you're making progress. You acknowledge that the deal doesn't implicate actual security at all and is just about ARABS. If you can learn that you were squealing out of ignorance why not assume others can?
Posted by: oj at March 19, 2006 10:12 AMOJ,
I said from the beginning that Bush's MBA-think was muffling his political acumen.
Wariness during wartime is not ignorance. Losing big in November is not wisdom. Does Democratic control of the House impact security? Who passes the federal budget?
Posted by: Palmcroft at March 19, 2006 11:17 AMPalm:
Yes, many of the critics are unable to grasp how effective the CEO model has been, because they're ideologues, uninterested in actual results:
http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/2002/05/stupid_like_a_ceo.html
Racism is always a lack of wisdom and your hysterics and that of your fellow travellers is only good for Democrats. But the GOP isn't likely to lose many if any seats in November. It's probably not possible to lose seats with an economy this good, as witness the 1998 impeachment election.
Posted by: oj at March 19, 2006 1:38 PM