California Conservative

I just finished reading Andrew McCarthy’s piece for NRO on the Dubai Port transaction. If only our legislators were as serious as people like Mr. McCarthy, we’d be in alot better shape. Here’s a glimpse of Mr. McCarthy’s article:

With the approval of the Bush administration, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over commercial management of shipping and stevedoring operations at six major American ports, located on the eastern seaboard and in New Orleans. When attention was suddenly drawn to this development last week, the urge toward public-safety questions was understandable. Not panic, but legitimate questions.
Sure as Dean follows Howard, though, understandable concern rapidly degenerated into calculated hysteria from poseurs seeking to claim the high ground from a president against whose measure they stand as national-security Lilliputians. Accelerating the downward spiral, the administration’s initially temperate but unconvincing defense of the transaction devolved just as quickly into nauseating politically correctness.
Neither corner of the ring has distinguished itself. In one, leading Democrats and some Republicans are evidently shocked to learn that many of the nation’s ports are managed by foreigners. Indeed, even as they railed against the prospect of this buy-out by UAE’s Dubai Ports World, Inc., they skipped past the inconvenient fact that the seller, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, is a British concern.

McCarthy isn’t fully on board with the idea of having the UAE managing these ports but he’s very dismissive of Democrats who think they’re damaging the President’s reputation on the issue of national security.

To raise questions on the sale is one thing but it’s another thing to play politics with the issue. Clearly, the average American doesn’t think that everything should be turned into a political fight, especially with national security. I’m not ready yet to say that Democrats are overplaying their hand yet but it’s obvious they’re heading in that direction.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Terrorism, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.