Heh. That would be a bit inconvenient, eh?
Menocchio, same here. I don’t get it either.
Holy fucking hell. I agree with Diogenes the Cynic. This is an odd feeling.
Okay, well, our politics are usually pretty much the same, but somehow we manage to disagree on most stuff.
Indeed. I get raging headaches lately just from trying. Having to say “Bush is right” on this just sent my jaw into spasms.
I’ll take Thread Titles Not Likely to be Posted by Diogenes the Cynic for $1000, Alex.
Agreed on all counts, myself, though I’ll admit to finding it somewhat humourous that all the effort Bush & Co have put into making people afraid of those evil Arabs has come back to bite him in the ass like this. It really does make me wonder about the American public, though, willing to pin responsibility for a business deal between two foreign companies on Bush. Y’all need to stop smoking so much crack I think.
I dunno. On the face of it, it certainly seems like Bush did the right thing, and if so then he certainly deserves credit for it. On the other hand, the phrase “Bush did the right thing” just doesn’t seem to parse for me at all. A part of me wonders if this wasn’t just another prematurely aborted round of “Nobody could have known:”
A. Bush recieves solid intelligence that a given course will lead to disaster.
B. Bush ignores said intelligence.
C. Disaster ensues; thousands die.
D. “Nobody could have known…”
Repeat about once every two years. So I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if a video surfaced in the next couple months showing Bush staring off into space while being debriefed on the recently uncovered, highly classified “destroy the U.S. by smuggling HIV-positive fire ants via Dubai” plot. The world just seems to work that way, lately.
I’m not wholly surprised to learn that Dubai had second thoughts on the whole affair, either. If I were representing Dubai in this deal, I’d certainly be freaked out. “Wait a second… Bush is on *our * side? He’s backing *us * against his own Congress? What the hell’s going on? Cancel the deal! We don’t want to die!”
I’ve been doing a lot of googling and I can’t find a law. I got a lot of hits from blogs and message boards (both left and right) which keep shouting that the UAE doesn’t recognize Israel but none of them cite a federal law. I found one left wing blog that claims the deal “may violate federal law” but doesn’t elaborate.
Maybe I just haven’t entered the right search terms but I have to believe that if such a law existed we would have heard the opponents of the deal chanting it like a mantra.
This meme is oft repeated these days. I don’t get it. Bus has certainly used fearmongering of Islamic Terrorists to push his agenda and play fast and loose with the law, but when has he ever talked about “evil Arabs”? It’s Congress that is making the Arab = Terrorist assumption here.
Menocchio, I was struck by that very same irony. I suffered a bit of cognitive dissonance the other day when I was reading that Bush’s approval ratings had dropped to 34%. At first I was elated but as I kept reading, I saw that a lot of the drop was due to the UAE Ports deal and I actually got kind of pissed. It felt surreal to find myself thinking the public was wrong to turn on Bush-- at least that this is completely the wrong REASON.
I actually think the Dems would have done themselves more good by DEFENDING Bush. It would have looked less transparently opportunist and political and they would have been right.
Another endorsement of the OP. Now if only Bush the Lesses could come to his senses about the whole “remaining in office” thing…
The Bush administration has studiously avoided being specific when talking about “the terrorists”, not least because being specific would have made it obvious that “the terrorists” are (or at least were) in no way connected to Iraq. They put enormous effort into convincing the American public to conflate Arab and Islamic with terrorism in order to sell the war against Saddam, and by the look of things appear to have succeeded brilliantly. So…err…what’s your point exactly? That I should have said “evil Moslems” instead of “evil Arabs”? I frankly don’t think the distinction is at the forefront of the mind of Joe Public. Or are you denying that the Bush Administration has played a large role in creating this circumstance where everyone is conflating “Moslem from the MENA region” with “person likely to support the terrorists”?
It only looks transparetnly opportunistic to smart people. You know, like you and me. 
Do you think politicians care about us? Polls consistly show ~80% of Americans want this deal killed.
OK, I give up: why two Pit threads on this topic, both started in the past 24 hours?
As I’ve said in the GD thread, even if Bush is right on this, it’s by sheer dumb luck. His Administration didn’t bother to do its homework to establish whether or not there was a potential security risk in this transaction, but he was defending the deal, and threatening to veto any measure to block it, pretty much as soon as he knew the deal existed - and surely before he knew his people had fucked up in the execution yet again.
At any rate, I think Bush is wrong, for the reasons I’ve gone into in that thread, and that Michael Ledeen’s proposal is the obvious (and apparently common) way to handle such situations. (How does xtisme agreeing with DtC compare with my agreeing with Ledeen? I think Ledeen and I come out way ahead in this tag-team event, but I’m biased. 
**)
That this apparently fairly standard way of insulating the ultimate owner of a security-related business from the security-related aspect of the business wasn’t even considered is, AFAIAC, more evidence of Bushie incompetence. Heckuva job, guys.
So excuse me if I don’t see why Bush deserves any credit from a community like this for being right here, if he is indeed right. When I was a math perfesser, I expected more than the right number in the answer block; I expected some evidence that they’d gotten there by some process that would lead to right answers in similar problems. I don’t see any of that here.
RTFirefly, while logical, Mr Ledeen’s proposal sounds a trifle… protectionist. Free market globalization and all that. By extension, if the company running the ports were publically listed, the magic 51% of stock would have to be banned from foreign ownership, etc. Unless, of course, you’re one o’ them anticapitalist types.
Just because you keep saying this doesn’t make it true.
Whatever “security risk” exists is so minimal as to be nonexistent. I don’t know why you keep bringing up that thread of yours-- your arguments there were debunked. No point in repeating the same nonsense here.
Beats me, but you think I’m going to close a thread started by Diogenes titled “Bush is right”? No way. This is a truly singular event, like the moon landing or the time I found $10. Closing it would like finding a unicorn in your backyard and then shooting it.
Any more questions? I still have lots of analogies in reserve, like water balloons in a tree fort.
:dubious:
But how else would you get the head to stuff and mount over your fireplace?
I’m perfectly aware of that. I’m also aware of the fact that other countries run other American ports. My objection still stands, and applies to all.
Well, how do you keep them from eating the azaleas?
I found $100 note few years ago.
Parked by the store, stepped out of the car and there it was, right next to my foot. Crisp, almost brand new, very sweet.
Probably, it was dropped by some filthy rich Islamic terrorist.
After all, I do live in vicinity of a pretty major port.
If it had a picture of Benjamin Franklin on it, it’s mine. Please return.