From the diaries. Hearts and minds indeed. See TalkLeft and our own diarist remove office for more about Ali Shalal Qaissi, the man in the infamous photograph. mcjoan
In defending the Dubai Ports deal, the usual suspects pundits (Friedman, Cohen, Ignatius, et. al) had the unmitigated gall to argue that rejecting the deal hurts us in the eyes of the world, especially the Arab world. An example of this outrageous chutzpah, supreme stupidity and craven coziness with the Bush Administration is from David Ignatius who, in the face of very tough competition, is the winner of the stupidest Beltway pundit contest, in my opinion. In his latest idiocy, Ignatius wrote:
President Bush tried to do the right thing on the Dubai ports deal, but he got rolled by a runaway Congress. The collapse of the deal was a measure of Bush's political weakness -- but even more, of America's traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics. The ironic fact is that the UAE is precisely the kind of Arab ally the United States needs most now. But that clearly didn't matter to an election-year Congress, which responded to the Dubai deal with a frenzy of Muslim-bashing disguised as concern about terrorism. And we wonder why the rest of the world doesn't like us.
(Emphasis mine.) Can we count the number of stupidities in this one paragraph? Let's start with the statement "Bush tried to do the right thing." If Bush believed the Dubai was the right thing to do, then he should have argued for it, as he has for every stupid thing he has ever done, starting with his mendacious case for the Iraq Debacle. What Ignatius can not get through his thick skull is that politics trumps all for BushCo. It was Rove that decided to pull the plug on the deal, not Bush. Bush is a clueless idiot who didn't even know about the deal until after the fact. This is a classic example of the Ignatius/Friedman/Cohen tactic of Bush absolution. It is disgraceful.
As for "America's traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics," it takes a degree of shamelessness not seen outside the likes of Ignatius, Friedman and Sully to write those words. It was their hysterics, their "post-9/11 trauma" - that led to the catastrophic Iraq Debacle. The LAST people on Earth who should be accusing anybody of "post-9/11 trauma" are the Ignatiuses and Friedmans of our punditocracy.
More on the flip.
But the ultimate in chutzpah is the feigned concern for world opinion from these shameless pundits. To now cry concern about "what will the world think" - to parrot those words from the Bush Administration - is such an outrage, that one wonders how these people look themselves in the mirror. For David Ignatius to pretend he NOW cares what the world thinks is simply a lie. I do NOT believe him. I call him an outrageous liar and a simpleton to think we will be taken in by his lie. We know better.
David Sirota puts it well:
With the termination of the Dubai ports deal, President Bush today says he is "concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, especially in the Middle East." This line has been parroted by the punditocracy, which claims that legitimate questions of national security are "ethnic profiling" (aka. "racial profiling"). The hypocrisy is as thick as a milkshake - Suddenly, we're expected to believe George W. Bush and the pundits who pushed the Iraq War deep down really cares about the messages America is sending to the rest of the world. What an incredibly insulting joke.
. . . For the pundits, the hypocrisy is even more disgusting. They claim those who do not want the UAE - a country with very recent ties to terrorists - to control our ports are supposedly "racial profiling" all Arabs. These are the same pundits who, knowing that there was no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists, loudly supported invading Iraq anyway because it would supposedly send a message "in
the heart of the Middle East" - clear code for sending a message to all Arabs. The Iraq War was, in other words, the greatest act of indiscriminate ethnic profiling/targeting in America's recent history - ethnic profiling largely supported by the same class of elite pundits that now self-righteously berates those who courageously sought to stop the UAE deal.
The truth is, George W. Bush and the neoconservative opinionmakers that dominate today's news are people who have no "concern" for what the world thinks. Bush is a guy who has tried to slash funding for public diplomacy and foreign aid, and who most recently appointed Karen Hughes as America's top international public diplomacy official, despite the fact that her only experience is serving as a Republican political hack. He's the guy who thinks that reaching out to the world on foreign policy means insulting the world's intelligence by simply repeating over and over again that everything is going perfectly in Iraq. And incredibly, the neutered pundits and reporters, desperate to stay in good graces with their White House masters, has disgustingly interpreted Bush's contempt for the world as "toughness," no matter how much that attitude has actually weakened America's national security.
So I say to David Ignatius, Tom Friedman, Richard Cohen, et al., just stop it. Nobody believes you. You are known to be outrageous craven liars. You would do well to just shut your yaps about such things. While it is true that your credibility could not go lower, at the very least, you can escape our further anger.