Ports

It was a good week for all of the media right, left, and middle, plus both parties on all sides to spend on the UAE ports story that I found to be completely uninteresting. My main reason for disinterest is that while I’m not much of a believer in big government (or even big business) getting close to everything right, I’m not a “no government” person either (those would be called “anarchists”). In order for this particular issue to be a real problem, a rational person would have to be a “no government” person. 99% of what is done in government (like in business) is done by people that are career employees just doing their job day after day with a lot of oversight, processes and procedures, and unless the organizations are completely broken, they are going to generally do an “average job” … not excellent, not horrible, just “average”. After a 28 year career in “big business”, one realizes that while all the checking, reporting, status and meetings are far from exciting or glamorous, they do go a long way to guard against “the big boo-boo”.

The human condition is not in general “rational” however. Nobody likes to admit it, and normally we don’t, but it is written into our snake brains to “prefer like”, so we are all snake brain level racists (and gluttons, and sex fiends, and prone to violence … all just parts of our basic human nature). The combination of “Arab”, “Bush Administration” and “Outsource” allowed masses of people even including liberal Democrats to display their racism with abandon. After all, the former owner of the loading function at the ports was a BRITISH company, and of course we KNOW that those folks wouldn’t be terrorists. (Oh wait, all the bombers there last summer happened to be British citizens, but no matter, they are trustworthy as opposed to ARABS.

I saw General Tommy Franks on TV discussing the fact that the port of Dubai services more US military ships than any other port outside the US and the same company that handles fueling, loading, docking, etc is the one that was going to be doing it in the six US ports. They don’t of course handle security for the warships, but they wouldn’t be handling it for the ports either, the US Coast Guard and Customs do that … agencies of the same US Government that apparently a ton of folks believe doesn’t work well enough to review an application for some dock hands. Note: that is really what we are talking about here, not “owning the ports”, “security”, “controlling the ports”, or a host of other pieces of misinformation that flowed from sources of the left and right in this case. This one united both the fringes.

This is the kind of political controversy that a Democrat would never face, they don’t have the character to stand up for something, especially when the political answer is completely easy. Everyone knows that outsourcing is unpopular, and everyone knows that “Arab” tends to be unpopular. Bill Clinton would never have got here, this is a tough political position to defend and be in, and he never stood up for any of those. The only thing he was fully committed to was sex with interns at the oval office. While on saner days, and apparently in private, many of the Democrats might admit that we sorely need allies in the Arab world, globalization is a reality, no US companies wanted to bid on the contract for the ports, UAE has been one of our best allies in the Arab world and racism isn’t that becoming, politics is a lot easier than statesmanship, so they are out sticking it to Bush, and if that makes the US look like a racist country that only bombs Arabs and has no real friendship with any, no matter.
This one has brought out a different class of Republican discontent. Harriett Miers brought out the folks that felt that winning elections ought to be about something, and if you made promises during the election, you at least tried to fight for them when you had the chance to make an appointment, even if you lost. Turns out that the fight is pretty darned easy in some cases and you CAN win, as was proven with Alito. The right wing folks out in front on this on are the “America first, last, and let the rest of the world rot if you have to” isolationist wing. What is sad is to see the number of Republicans that ought to be more up on world affairs willing to sit on the sidelines and let Bush just keep taking the flak, since they know this one is a tough sell politically. Some of it is no doubt 2nd term fatigue and off-year election jitters, but it is sad to see that there is more knee weakness in the Republican party than is often evident.

One thing certainly DOES give me major pause though. Jimmuh Carter supports Bush on this one! Jimmuh has been 100% out to lunch on every issue from asking Amy, providing nuke reactors to the N Koreans, to being Howard “Job is my favorite book in the New Testament” Dean’s spiritual advisor. Since Jimmy thinks that America is having a crisis of moral values (his book), I was generally heartened that things must be much better than I thought, now this! Goes to show that it is a complex world, I’m just going to have to chalk it up to one of those phenomenons like “even a broken watch is right twice a day”.