are we pandering to people's fears?

david brooks thinks the furor over the port deal is due to politicians and "reactionaries" of the left and right playing on public ignorance and xenophobia of anything arab. after all, the dubai firm was fully vetted by an interagency panel, and nobody objected.

i'm not so sure it's really pandering, tho. we've lived in an atmosphere of fear since 9/11, and the story didn't break till after the new management arrangement was a done deal, so public anxiety was inevitable.

if the review had been completely out in the open—with full congressional involvement as suggested by the constitution's commerce clause—the ground would've been prepared gradually. the wisdom of having our ports run by a firm owned by a foreign government could've been hashed out. folk would've had ample opportunity to get informed and assured.

but no. that's not the way this administration does business. everything gets done on the sly and snuck past us, because what we don't know won't hurt us.

the monkey wrench in the works is that the truth will out. bush's crowd seems to think it won't matter if we learn what they've done after it's a fait accompli. we'll all be content to know they're watching over us and we don't have to worry our pretty little heads about a thing.

what they fail to anticipate is that when the truth comes like a bolt from the blue, all us little chickens will think the sky is falling.

it's basically the same phenomenon we just saw when ariel sharon, with g w bush's backing, ordered the israeli pullout from the gaza strip. it had to happen sooner or later, so why not do it and get it over with without any fuss, right? the master strategists totally failed to foresee the explosive palestinian reaction and hamas's ability to take credit for forcing the withdrawal. to avoid that and the hamas election win, all they needed was to strengthen abbas's hand by negotiating the pullout rather than doing it unilaterally.

like the sharon-bush decision, the port deal was made behind closed doors. bush can pass the buck as he always does by saying he knew nothing of it, but his people did it, and he hired them, so almost nobody's buying his excuses for a change—at least for now.

but the spin doctors haven't finished. we've yet to hear from big guns cheney, rummy, and rice, all of whom i'm sure will have "no doubt" about dubai, just as they had none that saddam was lying about wmd.

and if congress acts now, bush's veto threat still stands.