‘Bush is a victim of his own rhetoric’

February 22, 2006

Reuters’ Alan Elsner raises a provocative point today about the port controversy that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Elsner seems to be an agnostic on whether the deal is worthwhile, but argues that the White House shouldn’t be surprised by the fear-based reaction the port deal has received — the Bush gang has been tilling this soil for a while.

Bush has long been successful in persuading Americans they were under constant threat and he was the best man to protect them…. Fears have not subsided, pollster John Zogby said, although the United States has not suffered a major attack since September 11, 2001. Bush two weeks ago revealed a plot foiled in 2002 to fly an airplane into the West Coast’s tallest building and said the terrorist threat had not abated.

“That’s what makes this story so ironic. I guess you can’t have it both ways,” Zogby said.

Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University, said, “Bush is a victim of his own rhetoric. This deal flies in the face of the Bush administration’s general posture, which has been that there is much to fear out there and they have been vigilant in protecting the country.”

Well, maybe. To be sure, there are some key nuances at play. The White House has played on national fear for partisan purposes on too many instances — Scott McClellan still cynically uses 9/11 as a way to get out of uncomfortable jams — but the Bush gang has never specifically said Americans should be afraid of the United Arab Emirates.

Elsner’s point seems to be that the White House has stoked the fires of fear too broadly, and the argument is not without merit. Before 9/11, a limited port deal with a UAE company that operates many ports around the world wouldn’t have even generated wire copy. But the Bush gang has gone out of its way to convince the nation that the Middle East is a dangerous place. The region’s lack of democracies, the president says, make it a breeding ground for terrorism.

In this context, Americans are hearing — from the entire Republican congressional leadership, no less — that the UAE recognized the Taliban’s government and was used by the 9/11 terrorists as an operational and financial hub.

In a country that Bush has conditioned to be afraid, the White House shouldn’t be surprised by the reaction this is receiving. Is this to say all of the criticism of the port deal is fair? Probably not. But the phrase “you reap what you sow” keeps coming to mind.

as does the phrase: “9/11 changed everything.”

  • As Digby notes, Bush spent the presidential campaign slamming Kerry by saying things like this:

    I will never hand over America’s security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America’s interests at heart.

    … the senator would have America bend over backwards to satisfy a handful of governments with agendas different from our own.

    This is my opponent’s alliance-building strategy: brush off your best friends, fawn over your critics. And that is no way to gain the respect of the world.”

  • Introspection is a skill George W. Bush does not exercise, his brain being atrophied by years of alcohol and ********** abuse. I believe it literally hurts his head to try and think and thus he refuses to think about something twice unless forced by overwhelming circumstances.

  • Also interesting is that Bob Dole has now been hired to lobby for the deal. Hard to imagine the spouse of a sitting US Senator lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. Not hard to imagine if a Bush was involved (they’ll whore for anybody with money), but Bob Dole?

    Even worse is the report from 9/11-commission hearings that one chance to get Bin Laden was missed because he was keeping the company of the UAE Royal Family – http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/mar/25osama.htm.

    So Bush wants to give our ports over to a country that “harbors terrorists”? What?

  • Bush’s way out is to not allow the corporate media to cover the story. Bury it under sensational crap like they always do.
    Lou Dobbs of CNN, Keith Obermann of MSNBC are covering this story. Even Wolf Blitzer gave time to it. In this case, the fearmongering of the Bush people may work against them.
    We have wiretapping, torture, secret lists of protesters, Diebold voting machines, illegal war, $7 Billion a week in debt service, number of dead in Iraq, the list is endless. Nothing is done to change it, and mainstream media won’t address it.
    I sure hope this changes the tide. Even the Nascar idiots are upset.

  • What’s ironic is that the admin typically uses simple soundbites to sell complex issues that, were they understood, would be less favorably received. In this case, the soundbite/headline is harder to swallow than the real issue. Live by the sword…

  • NJ Gov. Jon Corzine, the former-US Senator, is having the state Attorney General sue in federal court to get the sale stopped, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is going to sue in state court to stop it.

    A couple of quotes from the state’s Republican congressmen:

    “The security of America is not for sale, and I hope that President Bush will correct this mistake by suspending this deal and investigating the reasoning behind this misguided decision” (Rep. Chris Smith, R-4th Dist.).

    Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-2nd Dist.) said he was “deeply disturbed” by the veto threat.

    This is all from an article in today’s Star-ledger, a local NJ paper.

    You go, Corzine!

  • Gee, I think there was a time when the Bush Admin said that there was a country in the MidEast that had ties to Al Qaeda and was planning on funding the terrorists and possibly supplying them with weapons of mass destruction. So what did we do?? We invaded the damn country. W said the information all checked out, didn’t he?

    Now, we have a country in the MidEast that had ties to the Taliban and was funding terrorists. So what do we do?? We let them buy out a company that is running our ports. And W says its all been checked out.

  • ThinkProgress has a pretty persuasive analysis on why this sale is not that big a deal since most of our port operations are already done by foreign countries anyway, and Singapore would have gotten this contract if the UAE hadn’t.

    But how sweet is it that Bush is getting swatted like a pinata by the whole country as a result of his own eternal twisting of the facts to suit his agenda? Will he now have to try and convince the country that the Middle East isn’t really so bad, only certain bits of it?

    Pass the popcorn.

  • Well, I dont know about you but the message I got from BushCheneyRoveCo is that trusting folks from middle eastern or Islamic nations is a “pre 9-11 mindset.” Not worrying about who runs our ports is a “pre 9-11 mindset.” Why, even trusting others is a “pre 9-11 mindset.”

    Or so my buddy Karl told me at a Rethug convention.

    I don’t understand why Georgie boy is so upset with me. I tried my best to understand and obey so he wouldn’t get all mad and call me a liberal or a Democrat (then i’d get kicked out of all the meetings).

    Maybe i’ll just crawl back in my cubbyhole. . .

  • Okay, if nobody else will do it, I’ll play the race card.

    The Bushies have made a career out of blurring any differences among the Muslim nations of the Middle-East. Hence Afghanistan=Taliban=Bin Laden=Sadaam=Iraq=Iran=A-rabs=Global Terrorism. When this administration says “terrorist” they aren’t expecting you to conjure up a picture of Timothy McVeigh. If those folks in the UAE are running around with beards and burnooses, a lot of people are going to freak out at the thought that they might have anything to do with the US of A.

    Yup, Dubya, as ye sow, old buddy….

  • Pre 9/11: I ain’t too thrilled about the deal; hey, life is good!

    Post 9/11: What the F—! This war sucks, and as Shrub keeps telling us, BEWARE, but I will protect you against THEM.

    King Brush has constantly preached the lowest common denominator of fear to the masses, and yes, the masses are more pissed than would otherwise be without his constant fear-mongering. He has reaped what he sowed.

    The only thing to fear is GWB and his delusional and slimy cabel

  • Post above:
    Last sentance- “only thing to fear” should be “greatest thing to fear”

  • Even though other foreign companies may have operated ports for us and nothing dangerous (that is, that we know of, or that has been made public) has come through the ports yet, I still think there’s a more substantive case to be made against this one, for two reasons (yep, I think if Bush is going to fight so hard for something, he’s definitely worried about having the mean green torn from his grasping little fingers– and so I have to wonder):

    1) First off, I think this whole thing shows that the people really want the kind of security that takes common-sense preventive measures, as opposed to relying almost exclusively on over-broad and ultra-intrusive investigative and military measures, as a response to 9/11.

    Do we want a military operation, if it’s called for to protect us? Yeah, sure. But do we want the ports and the airports relatively unguarded while we have troops dying in Iraq? Hell no!

    This shows that when people have their attention called to the fact that Bush can hand our ports over to a nation like Dubai whenever he chooses, the people remember that they want real security to handle the ports and that it’s terribly reckless to do otherwise. They want an answer for that.

    2) Second, people know the common-sense of “hit ’em in the pocket.” When a Middle East dictatorship that doesn’t cooperate with us well in combating terrorism is getting a slice of the pie, what can you do? Everyone knows that the countries closest to the problem will fal in line a lot quicker to stop it if they’re not being handed fat deals. And so it boggles the mind, when we know we’ve still got a big problem with terrorism.

    It’s like how we’ve never bothered to impose trade sanctions against different countries that were human rights abusers. People who know about those kinds of issues were always appalled. The difference here is that the terrorists attacked us. So now a lot of people are really going to wonder.

    The final lesson:

    Money’s what’s at work here, to make this deal happen. That’s what causes things to go down in a way that the common person can’t understand– that makes them see Bush (a person they think is a hard fighter against terrorism) apparently fighting to put us in a risky situation. They’re not noticing, or consequently thinking of, the money he’s fighting for, too.

    Capital speaks so loudly– loudly enough to move things, yet at the same time so silently as not to be noticed– to the point that it should frighten
    any observer.

    What we have here is a situation where the force of big money is operating
    to make things turn out the opposite way of how most people’s common
    sense would seem to call for; and without most of us being able to see what forces are at work to cause this– of course it confuses people.

  • Bush’s weakened position on security is sure to impact the upcoming inquiry of NSA wiretaps. Who is now going to trust this dufus, who just now learned that his people sold port operations to UAE, and then blindly threatens a veto? Repubs are realizing that they become accountable when supporting a tool for special interests who is both reckless and careless with the national security and is politically tone deaf..

    They’d rather go hunting with Cheney than agree with Bush on security right now.

  • The problem is, responding to terrorism has been a pretext from the get-go, ever since 9/11, for doing other things that they want to do: things that are selfish, about money, or things that are more ideolgical and that have nothing to do with most people’s values or what most people believe in. So they choose responses to terrorism where they can slip other parts of their agenda under the door– they’re not going to put in a lot of scrutiny where there’s a deal to be made, it looks like. That’s who’s calling the shots.

  • Swan, you are right on. Money is the ruler of this administration, for sure. Almost everything we despise about them has its root in that. Cronyism, hey, give a buddy a sinecure so he can make a few easy bucks. Iraq war reconstruction, why have competing bids when then our friends at Halliburton might not get the money. Lobbying, hmm, pretty clear there too. The things like incompetence, Katrina etc, are all symptoms of the disease. First, they want the money, and to get it, they make bad decisions, which at first go unnoticed, until the reason it is important to make good decisions comes around, making the errors readily apparent. If you put most things in this context, first, work back from what you see, which is usually somethng that seems illogical, egregious, or just downright stupid…as you peel back the layers, at the core you will see that someone is getting over on taxpayers, and the people getting over on taxpayers under this administration are the people with power, and the people who already have tons of money, hence the ridiculous form that the tax cuts took. I dont have a big problem with tax cuts, and whie Im not a supply sider, I do think they made the recession less bad than it could have been, but ahhhh, at what cost? A more skewed income distribution, a busted budget that is now being chopped of things for the people who are the have nots, and a future with growing deficits as far as the eye can see. Everything you see now reeks of narrowminded short-termism. Its greedy, self centered and almost every policy you see has a short term payoff for the ones on top, and in the end costs far and away more than you could have ever imagined. These last five years really have sucked….I hate to think where we go from here.

  • Also interesting that the former director of DP World’s European and Latin American operations, David Sanborn, was just appointed by Bush to head the U.S. Maritime Administration as a direct report to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. And now the U.S. agrees to a takeover by DP World of the company that currently operates six large U.S. ports.

    Hmmmmmm.

    And better yet, the deal agreed to by the U.S. contains certain unusual concessions that may limit U.S. access to DP World business records on U.S. soil.

    http://drewlbucket.blogspot.com

  • Anyone who is charged with protecting will suffer a similar fate to the Bush gang. If there is an attack and they don’t stop it then it’s their fault. If they foil the terrorist plot and they have nothing to show that proves they actuall did then we’re left with faith in their words. That’s what the problem is, having faith in them. How many burglers did the dog stop? How many seats-of-pants does he have to show for his efforts? Bottom line – I don’t believe they’ve foiled anything but themselves and they are doing a bang up job at that. I’ve lived through 11 other administrations going back to FDR and this is the first one that looks like it could improve the situation by just admitting defeat and quitting.

  • The revolving door between DP World and Bushworld exectutives is not something that big money wants on the nightly news. Big money doesn’t want images of rent-a-sentors like Dole to be in the media working for a foreign government. . Just as the Abramoff /Delay/Cunningham stew is coming to a boil, and pflamegate holds Cheney in limbo.

    The cozy arrangement that the repubs had with big money is about to tumble down because in the excessive looting frenzy , There was too little real attention paid to actual concerns of government and just like George’s oil company, America is deteriorating from neglect caused by incompetent leadership.

    Big business could take a tip from successful viruses. Don’t get too greedy so that your victim is seriously impaired. (big hits on medical care, retirement, education, infrastructure, military, employment, environment) The some African viruses don’t thrive because they are too deadly. Tony Soprano would avise big money to take a healthy cut, but don’t get so greedy. It’s bad for business when the country goes belly up.

  • I’m not sure it was ******* abuse, although it might have been ******* abuse. We might all be better off were it just **** abuse.

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