Portsmas

Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics.com writes about the new-found joy among Democrats over the ports management issue:

Six months ago Democrats were so excited about the potential damage to the Bush administration caused by the investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame's name, they began counting down the number of days until "Fitzmas" - the day special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald publicly announced his findings. As it turned out, "Fitzmas" was a total bust. But "Portsmas" - a moniker that describes the ongoing blow up over the Dubai Ports World controversy - is turning into the sort of extended political holiday that just keeps on giving to Democrats.

In their rush to capitalize on Bush's tone-deafness on the ports issue, the Dems are rushing bills to the floor of Congress that have not been well thought out, and their tone suddenly sounds much more like far-righties than far-lefties:

One lesson of the last two weeks is that political opportunism knows no ideological boundaries. In the wake of "Portsmas," Democrats have been quick to shed any inhibitions about ethnic profiling or concerns about our role in the "international community" to pounce on the political advantages presented by the DPW deal. As a result, some on the left are now sounding and acting an awful lot like Pat Buchanan and the reactionary right.

Hillary Clinton, for example, rushed to co-sponsor legislation with fellow Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey to ban all corporations owned by foreign governments from operating ports across the nation. This proposal, which may sound good to the average American in the current context of the DPW deal, flies in the face of the reality that eighty percent of our current port operations are conducted by foreign-owned corporations (many of which have ties to government) and that there are currently no U.S. companies large enough to assume the responsibilities of port operations even if we wanted them to. The practical application of Clinton's legislation is that the U.S. economy would be brought to a screeching halt.

Has anyone in the press asked Hillary who she would propose to run the ports? How about Halliburton? Even they're not big enough to jump in and handle all of our port operations quickly, but they're as close to qualified as anyone. How would the lefties, who revile Halliburton as the very devil itself, react to handing them billions of dollars in port management fees?

Bevan thinks this ports issue is one that the Dems might actually be able to capitalize on, given their usual modus operandi of overplaying their hand:

Port security is a serious issue, and there is a chance, albeit a small one, that Democrats will so vastly overplay their hand the public will react negatively to displays of such rank hypocrisy. But with the Bush administration standing strong on its support of the deal and Congress initiating a 45-day review of the DPW deal, it doesn't look like "Portsmas" will be ending anytime soon.

Bush is going to have to present a better case for the ports issue than he has so far, though I'm not sure there's any case he can make whipalatableake it palitable to most Americans to allow an Arab firm to run our port operations.