Zuruck wrote:you know dissent, you mentioned something that rattles some cages. Bush's machine got him in office by being very, very good at politics and they seem to be dropping the ball quite a bit lately. Is it because Bush has stopped listening to them or maybe they have stopped protecting the ineptitude that is the White House. How does Karl Rove get a just plain dumb man re-elected, then allow something like this? It's boon for the Dems and everyone knows it. I wonder if there is something more to come that we don't know about...
Zuruck your assumptions are all wrong. First Bush is not a dumb man. He's not a very good speaker when he's in front of the camera but he's also a good politician (at least as much as any politician can be called good...lying scumbags all of them).
As to whether or not he's not being told the right thing to say, have you considered he's actually saying the right thing about this?
What if he hears everyone going off half cocked on this, hears and reads the press totally misrepresent the deal and how it went through and he is simply sticking up for the UAE because they
deserve this opportunity?!?!
After all, unlike the many stories we've read in the press, the truth is:
A foriegn company was in charge of managing the ports in question and after this deal...GASP....a foriegn company is still in charge...
The "secret" deal with the Whitehouse that was reported turns out to be no different than the way every review of a company going through the process is a "secret"...
As to security concerns, the company never was going to be in charge of port security and the Bush administration made them concede to measures of accountability and transparency of records, past, present, and future, that others in the same situation never had to abide by...
Contrary to many reports about how this is an attempt to screw the unions out of a contract the labor is still going to be performed by american labor union members...
The only difference between the old company and the new one is that they are owned by arabs instead of Brits...so the only material reason we've been given for turning them down is that they are arabs!
You should be outraged at the press for getting this story so wrong. And you should question the motives for misrepresenting the facts the way they did!!
Or do we go with the flow and follow the logic of these chicken littles and incumbant demagogues politicians?
Lets stop flights from all arab owned airlines from entering the U.S.? After all it was arabs on airplanes that attacked us!!!
We should probably freeze assets in arab owned companies and banks since it was arab owned banks and companies that funneled the money to finance the 9/11 hijackers!
If that sounds like nonsense then please explain how that reaction is any different from the one we've seen drummed up in the
press (they really don't deserve that title anymore).
Here's a clue:
The issue was bound to
sound like a bad idea to an ignorant populace. To turn it into a
big problem all it took was a negligent press to fan the flames ignited by the political hacks instead of doing their duty and pouring the cold water of objective analysis upon the story.
So political opportunity knocked and politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken their constituencies fears, ignorance, and inability to think beyond a 30 second sound-bite and parlayed that into campaign posturing and rhetorical talking points!
What hasn't changed though is the cold hard fact that every shipping container that arrives in any of our ports has a 90% chance of going un-inspected! Those numbers are the same whether or not it was the old british company managing the unloading or when the UAE company manages the process.
Right now, before this deal goes through, any terrorist in the world can go to work for the british company and be there on the dock when his shipment of WMD's slips into america.
Any citizen of any country that was ever a part of the British Empire can legally move to the UK and go to work for the company that is in charge of our ports today! Or they can wait until the UAE gets in control and try to get a job with them....
So really, what's the difference? Besides the value of scaring up some votes or picking on arabs just for being arabs, what's the value of this outrage? Certainly not homeland security that's for damn sure!