Unbelievable. CNN's Jeff Greenfield plays the race card both ways--moaning about how white people get stopped at airport security (when you KNOW we should be exclusively hassling The Swarthies), then whining that opposition to the Dubai Port deal was based exclusively on "xenophobia." (He even throws in the illegal immigrant meme before chastising others for "racism.") He even lists a slew of failures of the Bush Administration without once acknowledging who's to blame.
He points directly to Dubai's support of the Taliban, then
promptly dismisses it.Don't you wish you were smoking what HE's smoking?
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/09/greenfield.portpolitics/index.htmlOur nation, whose airport security system has ensured that no 84-year-old wheelchair-bound great-grandmother slips past the scrutiny of a system that makes no distinctions based on race, gender, sexual preference, disability, or no-chance-in-hell-this-one's a terrorist...
Were there real questions about who should run the commercial operations of U.S. ports? Sure. And Dubai's past policies -- one of three nations in the world to recognize Afghanistan's Taliban regime -- could give anyone pause.
But let's not kid ourselves. What proved fatal to the plan was a potent mix of politics and a longstanding American impulse toward xenophobia, which has existed in tandem with our welcoming hand to others.
Hey Jeff: if you're so damned concerned about port security, where was your outrage when THIS exchange took place?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/2/22/165231/370KERRY: This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security. Those aren't my values. I believe in protecting America first.
And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut -- and that's who gets it -- long before we do, I'm going to invest in homeland security and I'm going to make sure we're not cutting COPS programs in America and we're fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants.
The president also unfortunately gave in to the chemical industry, which didn't want to do some of the things necessary to strengthen our chemical plant exposure.
And there's an enormous undone job to protect the loose nuclear materials in the world that are able to get to terrorists. That's a whole other subject, but I see we still have a little bit more time.
Let me just quickly say, at the current pace, the president will not secure the loose material in the Soviet Union -- former Soviet Union for 13 years. I'm going to do it in four years. And we're going to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.
LEHRER: Ninety-second response, Mr. President.
BUSH: I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises. It's like a huge tax gap. Anyway, that's for another debate.