Hmm. I was thinking of the whole kerfuffle as "base xenophobic demagoguery," rather than "populist xenophobia," but basically we're on the same track.
Always odd to find one's self agreeing with Bush against most everyone else in politics.
I like "Malikalikes" and would like to incorporate it into my daily conversation.
Ah, well Drezner cleared things up a bit more for me. I really shouldn't rely on 10-second sound bites on NBC nightly news as my basis for my knowledge of current events.
On an unrelated subject, do they show the Winter Olympics on TV in Australia-land?
New headline this hour on Yahoo! News:
Arab Co., White House Had Secret Agreement.
And yet, this, too, upon an actual reading of the fucking article, isn't really as bad as the headline makes it look. You see, every deal with a foreign company of this sort is privately negotiated, and records of the negotiation "are regularly guarded as trade secrets." Thus, it seems, the administration has "A Secret Agreement" with all kinds of foreign firms. So why the scary headline, AP?
Well, a few reasons spring to mind. Not that this is a card I particularly like to play, but maybe if they weren't from a country that has "Arab" right there in the name?
Sho: I'm sure they do. Nobody watches them, though, because we're all at the beach.
Yeah, so "Arab" is in the name. But for Christ's sake, Dubai's the Arab Hong Kong. My problem is with the word "secret" as some exception, when every such vetted deal leads to a trade secret. Trade secrets: by definition more countless than the secret spices in KFC chicken. With this headline (and I feel myself moving to RedState territory, and don't like it a bit) the AP seems to play up a false *secrecy* angleto add some nefariousness to the Bush administration's (for once) entirely reasonable stance.
Angleto: my favorite Italian dessert.
Time for me to state my usual, ill-informed opinion. Even if this was a rational move, you've still got wonder what the administration was thinking. Imagine the uproar if the Kennedy administration had turned over management of a few east coast ports to China during the height of the Cold War. Same difference.
Or imagine if the Nixon administration had opened trade relations with China at the height of the Cold War! Now that would be nuts!
Bah. There's a big difference between trade relations and turning over the management of several key ports to the other side. At the very least you've got to acknowledge that this proposal guaranteed a PR disaster.
"The other side"? The other side of what? The War on Shipping Companies?
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