http://americandaily.com/article/12146

The Loyalist Gropes The Elephant
By David Tatosian (02/28/2006)

Loyalists defending the Dubai port deal endeavor to focus our attention on the dissimilarity between ownership and management.

Perhaps they assume this lawyerly preoccupation with contractual niceties justifies their defense of the indefensible. The indefensible being Mr. Bush’s obsession with commerce and cronyism in lieu of any real efforts at Homeland security.

Niceties and loyalist mendacity aside, the fact ! remains that American ports handle millions of containers a year. A ridiculously small number of those containers are ever screened or inspected. They share their journey, from their respective points of origins, with millions of unscreened containers headed for American ports and ports in other nations.

In fact, customs officials know little more about unscreened containers now then they did before 9/11. This is an egregious failure of both Mr. Bush and his DHS.

For Mr. Bush and friends to say the management of our ports has no bearing on, or is not any way related to, issues of national security is either an outright lie, gross negligence or a profound inability to understand the world in which we now live.

Any or all of these being the case, Mr. Bush has rendered himself useless in the defense of this nation.

Mr. Bush and his fan club have convinced themselves that an open borders policy, an inadequate container security initiative and the profferin! g of our ports to Arab Muslims represents a comprehensive national security program.

To prove the resounding success of this policy, both parties point to the fact that there have been no attacks in our homeland since 9/11.

In making this claim, Mr. Bush simplistically surmises that the absence of an attack precludes the possibility of an attack.

When American citizens disagree and demand Mr. Bush stop giving away the nation and instead honor his oath to protect us, we are accosted by the loyalist pundits and talking heads.

We are called xenophobic and racist.

Grover Norquist, that champion of Islam, assures us that when the deal goes through the only ones left whining will be the bigots.

Not to be outdone, Larry Kudlow, sounding like a representative of CAIR at a sensitivity seminar for our law enforcement agencies, has boldly proclaimed those in opposition to his president’s wish’s to be Islamophobic.

Apparently xenophobia, racis! m and bigotry don’t come close to describing the hateful and ignorant depths to which Americans have sunk in our insensitive demands for national security.

However, the magnanimous Mr. Kudlow still tries to rescue us from our darkness. He assures us that; “…the UAE is also the only country in the middle east that allows US Customs Inspectors to check cargo headed for America…” But of course, signatories to the container security initiative allow us no such thing. They allow US Customs agents to oversee a screening process that is performed by the host country’s customs officials.

For Mr. Kudlow, this particular dissimilarity has no relevance to the subject at hand.

Mr. Kudlow admonishes against erecting political, trade or commerce barriers against Arab nations who’ve aligned themselves with Bush’s terror war and who wish to do business with us as a result of that alliance. Mr. Kudlow continues, ”…Tearing down barriers to promote global connectivity is! a much better strategy…” Besides, this terror war” is against a, ”…tiny minority of the Muslim Community…” The Islamofacists.

Mr. Kudlow is correct in that sense; Islam has over 2 billion members. The millions of Muslims available to mobilize, at a moment’s notice, and commit murder and mayhem across the globe do constitute a minority of that number.

Mr. Kudlow, like Mr. Bush, insists we view that amoral minority as distinct and separate from the great number of Muslims who are, we are told, horrified (but silent) at the carnage and savagery carried out in the name of their peaceful religion.

But that proposition is false and suicidal. It not only ignores the violent and bloody history of Islamic imperialism and subjugation, it also indicates the absence of an even rudimentary knowledge, by our leaders, of Muslim scripture and traditions that encourage those aspirations.

It is ironic that conversations between Bush and Rove deriding Democrat opponents! have surfaced as each new day reveals more and more of their own duplicity and arrogance.

In less than two weeks the backroom Duabai deal has grown from six ports to include stevedore services in 22 ports.

The longer legislators wait to stop this man, by any means necessary, the more at risk we are to attack.

And in the aftermath of any attack, those same legislators will be no less accountable for their dereliction of duty.

American lives should not be such a trifling matter to those sworn to protect us.