the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Random presidential opinions

Bruce Bartlett has apparently caught some flack for calling George W. Bush a conservative impostor. As I listened to his interview on Fresh Air, I was asking one question of the radio (which, by the way, rarely answers me): Who didn’t already know this about President Bush?

I knew Bush wasn’t a true conservative, even before any of the “security” bloat that followed 9/11. Of course, to me, calling someone conservative or liberal doesn’t equate with making a value judgment about that person; but will someone please explain to me how gullible (or maybe just inattentive) you have to be to believe Bush is a conservative? Bartlett makes a lot of good points about the misplaced trust of most voting Americans in one major party or the other. I completely agree with that sentiment.

Another point Bartlett raised in his interview is the fact that George W. Bush is the first president since John Quincy Adams to go an entire four-year term without using a veto. Which brings me to the next Bush-related opinion I have: I don’t get all the opposition to the Dubai Ports World deal, at least as it pertains to naked security issues.

Any politician crying security over this deal who isn’t raising at least as much of a fuss over the ongoing failure to secure U.S. shipping ports should probably be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I’m not against making sure the review process is complete, but I’d like to see how many lawmakers opposing this deal are in states where the deal could be considered a political liability in an election year.

Having been employed in a field that deals, at least peripherally, with transportation security, let me assure you (or unassure you, as it may be) that there are way too many security holes in our international shipping model to be dreaming up elaborate terrorist conspiracies by a company whose officers can’t vanish nearly as easily as OBL.

As security is concerned, I’m far more disturbed by the grand gestures our government has been passing off as security measures while the smaller, more achievable measures seem to be slipping through the legislative cracks. While I am loathe to bless the President on much of anything, the uproar over this matter seems to be largely the product of political grandstanding and naivete.

That’s all for now.

(But Will Bunch has a little more on it…)

I’m with you Howard, I don’t entirely get it. The British company that did this work was bought by a company from UAE. It’s not like our government was trying to contract the work out to a country that may(or may not) sympathize with terrorists.

I would imagine that the brouhaha over this deal looks somewhat anti-Muslim (or anti-Arab). How could it not? And that doesn’t necessarily seem like such a good idea.

But what do I know?

That’s another angle I consider relatively important. To the White House’s credit (whoa, there’s something I don’t say too often), they probably understand the perception that denying this deal would perpetuate.

Where the White House may be to blame is in the fact that the terror card being played against them right now is the same card they’ve been using to near-perfection for the past few years. The irrational fears drummed up by those tactics can’t be switched off very easily. In that way, maybe they’ve made their own bed—to some degree, at least.