I've been reading some follow-up reporting on the Dubai pullout (on the Huffington Post) - intriguing little tidbits about the entire debacle being a Rove-engineered thing, with Halliburton as the ultimate beneficiary - and like I say, it's intriguing reading, conspiratorial but (at this point, God knows) eminently believable. (I won't get into what really intrigued me, but was unmentioned: does Halliburton really stand to benefit from this deal when their name all but sylabically rhymes with Cheney? Although, then again, if steering the deal to Halliburton was Rove's plan all along, then the lot of 'em wouldn't exactly care about potential public uproar, which they'd undoubtedly try to marginalize as far-left reactionary miscreants voicing their usual "Halliburton's Satan" claptrap. But I do digress.)
The most single most shocking thing about the Dubai ports deal wasn't/isn't any Rovian chicanery or purified-Machiavellian wunderkind-behind-the-scenes string-pulling or anything like that - and nor was/is it the shockingly tin ear the Bushies possess when it comes to reaping what they've sown, which is intense public fear of anything/everything Middle Eastern. No, the shock comes when you think on this simple fact: the American people lost their collective mind pondering U.S. ports in an Arab company's operational hands (and to be fair, the public's concerns were utterly legitimate, and I share them); they did NOT lose that same beleaguered collective mind when torture, spying, indefinite detention or other, equally delectable Bushian assaults on personal liberty and the American ideal came a-calling.
That simple truth shocks me to my very marrow. As it should you.
When I first heard of America's torture policies, care of the photos from Abu Ghraib in April of '04, I was, as I'm sure you were, appalled and sickened and humiliated. There was that feeling, quasi-spiritual, of having your soul's guts twisted, and - I remember this distinctly, sitting at my desk, proofreading for a major advertising company in Los Angeles, comfortable and decidedly un-tortured - that terrible push/pull of wanting to do something NOW, with attendant feelings of impotence immediately following. Was there a national outcry that approached the one attending the Dubai deal? Hardly. Torture was fed through the mainstream media's forever-equivocating lenses, digested as an issue you could choose a side on, and spat out as something maybe, just maybe, America had to stoop to in these frightening times. It was fabulously 1984-ish, and every tyrant in history would've been swollen with pride and envy at the Bushies' deft moves to make torture acceptable.
Previous to the torture making news, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was snatched up and stuck in solitary confinement, where he'd rot for close to 3 years, denied his habeas corpus rights, which go back to the Magna Carta. Ho-hum, said America. Pass the Cheetos. He deserved it. Nothing to see here.
Post-torture, and very recently, there as the illegal spying, a program whose breadth and depth we may never know, thanks to kowtowing sycophant ass-kissers who have not the slightest clue country comes before party. America's collective voice? Saying the following: "Who's gonna win American Idol?"
It's a disgusting truth, but it's there for the despots to mull over: the American people will put up with torture, being spied on, their citizens disappearing into legal black holes, but ports run by Middle Easterners, now THAT is going too far. And the sad thing is, I agree that it's going too far. But I also believe that you've abdicated the legitimacy of full indignation when torture and spying and citizen arrests have gone down previously, yet...you were silent, save for those with muffled voice who shrieked for justice when torture and the others came up.
America is all but begging for a good 'n proper fascist takeover. Considering what pisses the collective population off, expect real, real soon.