Quickies

I have no idea-r where to be on the whole ports issue ... UAE company/government running a port ... but I will say that there are some unbelievable twists to the story.

For instance ... while in one breath the democraps (and lots others, mind you) are howling about the fact that there is a distinct threat of terrorism by letting this happen (oh, not in so many words, but the inference is certainly there) ... if 4 of the company officials came to visit in D.C., the political correctness rules that these same democrats insisted upon would ban the airport officials from checking all four of them for weapons or whatever.

Think about that!

Having said that ... I am all over the place on the whole ports issue. This is due, in a very large part, to a fundamental ignorance (probably shared by 99% of the world, which to a large extent includes the majority of Congress-people screaming about the problem) of how the seaports of the world operate. Common sense dictates that the UAE are not going to buy the ports for obvious terrorist activities ... blowing them up or even bringing in something that could be traced back through them ... that would be INSANE (paint a gigantic target on their castles). BTW ... you will note that, like in virtually all wars throughout history, the rich and powerful of the Islamists are notoriously good at saving their own asses ... but I digress. One might argue in fact that the UAE folks are laying everything on the line by doing this, since (if they ever cross Osama and pals), these wide open assets set up an easy target for the terrorists against the UAE ... and the repurcussions are that the political hacks in D.C. would demand a pound of flesh if something went wrong.

The downside I see is if the "owners" of whatever it is that these guys would be involved in would a) be privvy to otherwise inaccessible information regarding operations of the US ports (i.e. opportunities to uncover weaknesses that they would not normally be able to get), or b) much more importantly: would allow them to gain access to security related information along those same lines (something that they would not otherwise be able to get).

Note: the key here in both cases is the phrase "they would not otherwise be able to get". If they already have the information, or the information is readily available ... then there is no point to denying them this contract.

There is an underlying thing, however, that gets under my skin, and itches like hell because it is something that Hillary also said (that cracking noise you just heard is the ice in hell) ... the "owners" of this company are not people, but the government of the UAE. Seems like we're in a lot of these types of deals ... mostly in totalitarian (even the particularly evil ones) regimes. China, Venezuala, etc. ...

I don't know why, but that just strikes me as bad.