You really don't see any difference between an argument for security based on actual defensive measures -- like checking cargo coming into the country -- and insane warmongering based on "preemptive wars"? As policy, intelligent toughening up of port security is not unreasonable and might actually catch someone smuggling in small nukes or such.
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Yes, that all sounds quite reasonable.
But you do realize, don't you, that the excited hand waving about this deal with Dubai Ports World has very little to do with a sober assessment of port security?
I find this entire thing very fascinating inasmuch as it shows the profoundly head damaged level of discourse on these matters in the United States. Of course, there are many reasons to ask tough questions about the deal but the fact the firm is Arab - which has become the beginning, middle and end of concern - should be quite low on the list.
I write this not for the usual multiculti reasons but because no one has presented any evidence the UAE firm is a conduit for terrorist activity: the most often repeated reason for alarm.
Via American National Public Radio, an outlet that makes me long for the sweet, sub atomically disentangling kiss of the supernova, we were told last night that the Israelis used their knowledge of the Entebbe airport (gained because an Israeli firm architected and constructed it) to rescue hostages during that 1976 drama. "Is it reasonable to fear," NPR on-air personality Robert Siegel asked his guest, Commander Stephen Flynn, "that Dubai Ports World's knowledge of US port security might lead to terrorists having similar sorts of inside knowledge?"
The commander was good enough to correct Mr. Siegel's error.
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5227018>
Democrats who attack this using the Arab = unsafe trope are not working to increase port security, nor are they ruining Bush's credibility. To the extent Bush's credibility is being damaged the job's being done by the deep subtextual reservoir of racial menace many seem to be drawing from as they bleat "security!" but display zero understanding thereof.
.d.
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If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
Jean Baudrillard