The Ports: A Brief Follow-up

A couple of this blog’s best friends have raised objections to my recent post about the port deal. ReddHedd argues:

…my problem all along with this issue has been precisely that, yet again, the Bush Administration failed to properly do its homework. In this case, yet again, they failed to follow the law and complete the legal requirements necessary. Whatever xenophobia issues may be involved from the likes of Malkin and LGF and all the former Administration water carriers now…well, they’ve been carefully cultivated by the Administration itself over the last five years. But its not a fire I wish to stoke, nor one that I think Democrats need to even come close to stoking.

Besides, between Chertoff’s “this whole process is secret, and I will not talk about it with Americans who ask questions” performance on Blitzer’s show last Sunday to the Bush veto threat (something he has yet to follow-through on…ever…in his tenure in the WH) to today’s “the President was clueless about this deal until the media started asking around” statement from McClellan — well, it’s just one big mess, isn’t it?

For me, it’s all about them cutting corners and failing to do their work. Again. And I would hope that we would all find that to be sickening, given the implications of all those previous times they’ve failed to do the homework and how that’s turned out. (Have you read Juan Cole today — that’s a good example all by itself.)

And Julia sez:

I’m kind of confused at how the frothing racist response on the right has obscured the fact that we’re being asked to treat a government which has for decades diverted its people from paying attention to some fairly nasty piratical oligarchic racist politics by privileging a strain of fundamentalist religion which demonizes other countries and religions and distracts the little people from how they’re being screwed as honest brokers.

I’m equally confused as to how we’re supposed to take their word for it that we can trust the UAE.

I don’t think that I disagree with any of the points raised here. This is indeed yet another example of the cronyism and incompetence that pervades the Bush presidency. I wouldn’t say that the Bush administration’s policy process is rotten to the core, because this requires the assumption that it has a policy process. I don’t trust the Bush administration on national security, and like Matt I particularly don’t trust them on port security. To repeat what I implied in the previous post, I continue to cling to the unfashionable belief that the President is actually required to obey the law, which in this case he didn’t. The UAE is a very, very bad authoritarian regime. And finally, there are therefore any number of arguments about this deal that do not require making xenophobic claims. And I certainly agree that Juan Cole is must-reading today! All these points are correct.

None of these arguments, however, to my mind fully address the narrow but still important question about whether there’s any reason to be particularly concerned by the fact that Dubai Ports World will operate some points. We already have ports being operated by extremely bad authoritarian regimes, and I don’t think anybody has suggested that these ports are particularly insecure. More importantly, all of the critiques of the Bush administration, in this narrow context, prove too much. I don’t trust the port security policies of the Bush administration, full stop. I wouldn’t trust them if they were operating the ports as well as being responsible for security, I wouldn’t trust them if they gave the contract to any private company, I wouldn’t trust them if they gave the contract to any other state- owned company. But this doesn’t explain why DPW getting the operating contract, in particular, is problematic. I’m definitely open-minded; maybe it is particularly bad. I’m certainly up for hearings and more transparency (and the deal is dead in any case.) But I haven’t really seen an argument directly on point so far.

One final point: one might argue that, however unpleasant the jingoism that has driven the issue, it performs the valuable service of drawing attention to Bush’s terrible record on port security. This may be true, and I hope it is. But I worry that there may be a perception that once the UAE company doesn’t get the contract that the issue will fade away, that to much of the public the issue will be about the A-rabs operating the port and not about the ineptitude of the Bush administration. This makes is all the more important, I think, to carefully distinguish between the decision-making process, which was indefensible, and the result, which is considerably more complex, and still doesn’t strike me as obviously bad.

…to reiterate, the decision-making process was highly deficient.

Lexblogging: The Passion of the Rebels

My second game at Rupp Arena was a bit less exciting than the first; in the 103rd meeting of the Wildcats and the Ole Miss Rebels, Kentucky eked out an 80-40 win. That gives Kentucky a 92-11 lead in the all time series. God, the SEC must have been a remarkably boring conference for most of its history; since 1933, Kentucky has won 43 titles. Tennessee, the next most successful team, has won eight. Is there any other major conference that has a similar imbalance?

The Rupp Arena crowd is very smart, and has very high expectations. This is particularly true of the area I’ve beens sitting, because many of the fans have had tickets for twenty years of more. They know all the players, have a refined sense of the game, and expect that Kentucky will dominate. It’s a lot of fun.

Tonight, the Wildcats played like the team they were supposed to be this year. Their next three games are tough; at LSU, at Tennessee, and Florida at Rupp. It will be interesting to see what they’ll do in the tournament.

Stupidity is Suboptimal

And the Russians break a 3rd period scoreless tie on a powerplay resulting from an idiotic penalty taken by…Todd Bertuzzi! What a surprise! It’s almost enough to make me believe in karma…

…the Russians must be really kicking themselves for putting Ovechckin on the team. Silly Bure, everybody knows that you win on the big ice surface with slow old guys!

You Mean…Security Issues Can Be Used For Demagougery?

There’s something comforting in a way about reading the WSJ editorial page–neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor national security can prevent them from finding the union-busting angle in anything. But one problem with the print media is that your uncritical recitation of administration talking points can get stale very quickly:

Some of us are scratching our heads all right, but we’re wondering why Mr. Graham and others believe Dubai Ports World has been insufficiently vetted for the task at hand. So far, none of the critics have provided any evidence that the Administration hasn’t done its due diligence.

Whoops!

It is happens, I tend to agree with Glenn and Kevin that this isn’t a big deal. While the administration’s general approach to port security is scandalous, I’d have to say that while I guess it may be suboptimal I honestly doubt that giving a contract to the UAE company will have any significant impact on national security in itself. But it’s pretty funny to the WSJ shocked, shocked to discover that national security issues can be used for crude political purposes laced with demagogic xenophobia. Your petard, you hoist yourself upon it.

Cognitive Dissonance

Ann Althouse is making sense:

The difference between this case and Carhart, other than the change in the Court’s personnel and the fact that this is a federal, not a state law, is that Congress made those findings. In that light, this becomes a case about how much the Court ought to defer to a legislature when it acts in an area of individual constitutional rights and makes assertions about facts in order to define away those rights. I do not think that is territory the Court should cede to the legislative branch. It is the Court’s duty to say what rights are, and if rights are to be rights, a legislature seeking to work its will should not also have the power to structure the factual setting to make it look as though rights it wants to preclude do not exist.

Quite right; indeed, I would have nothing to disagree with except for the fact that Althouse enthusiastically supported the confirmation of the man who makes the overturning of Carhart, as the first step in the watering down of abortion rights to nothing, virtually inevitable. In this context, her now-meaningless defense of abortion rights is as hollow as Arlen Specter’s. Any supporter of Sam Alito has the blood of the gutting or overturning of Roe on their hands, period, and I’m frankly not interested in hearing their crocodile tears after the fact, as if we all didn’t know exactly what was going to happen.

Wisdom of the Day

From Dr. B.

Yeah, it can be like herding cats; then again, as any cat person knows, it’s actually not all that difficult to get cats to do what you want, as long as you don’t treat them like dogs.

Almost Wholly Irrelevant, Except for that Ruling Iraq Part

John Quiggin catalogues Insty’s history with Moqtada Al Sadr. Long story short, Sadr managed to fall off the radar screen both of Insty and the administration sometime in 2004, yet is now one of the most powerful men in Iraq. That democracy thing, looks like it’s going great.

I still can’t fathom why Sadr wasn’t killed or arrested in 2004.

Next Term’s Special: Filet of Roe

In a highly unsurprising decision, the Supreme Court agreed today to hear an appeal of (at least one of the many) Circuit court opinions striking down the Congressional ban on so-called “partial-birth” abortions. To recapitulate, there are two important questions: how will they rule, and does it matter?

• On the first question, it is virtually certain that the Court will vote to uphold the ban, and in so doing overturn the Court’s decision in Stenberg v. Carhart. (There is no question that the statute is unconstitutional as long as that case controls.) The earlier decision was 5-4 with O’Connor in the majority, and it is virtually certain that Alito will vote to uphold any regulation short of a ban. Only 2 possibilities, both remote, could save the precedent. One is that the ban could be struck down on federalism grounds. I think the chances of this are virtually nil (the court’s liberals have been consistent in upholding federal power, while Scalia and Kennedy have been willing to make outcome-oriented exceptions to Lopez.) The other possibility is that some members of the Court will flip (as effectively happened in Casey) so that a precedent will not be overturned just because of a change in personnel. This is, I think, scarcely more likely. Obviously, Scalia, Thomas and Alito–staunch opponents of Roe itself–are certain votes to uphold the statute and overturn Carhart. Kennedy made his visceral disgust for D&X abortion quite clear in his Carhart dissent (although, as Stevens and Ginsburg pointed out, there was little in the way of a rational argument attached to it); he’s not going anywhere. The last possibility is Roberts voting to uphold in his role as Chief; I suppose that’s unknowable, but I think that’s about as likely as the Royals winning 110 games this year. Carhart is finished.

• The second question is how much this matters. Many people seem to believe that this is a relatively trivial matter, that this is a minor sacrifice to appease the wishy-washy unprincipled middle that won’t matter much in the end. As I have discussed before, I believe this view is profoundly misguided. First, upholding a ban with no health exemption would be the death knell of the last remaining element of Roe‘s relatively robust protection of the right to choose, and would make a particularly toothless version of Casey’s “undue burden” standard (which is already vague enough to permit judges to plausibly uphold virtually any regulation short of a ban anyway) the benchmark for evaluating abortion regulations. This would essentially permit states to regulate their way to a de facto ban on abortion for non-affluent women. Second, while it is true that the “partial birth” bans are empty symbolism that don’t actually prevent any abortions from being performed but just make a few abortions more dangerous, their utter irrationality is precisely the problem: if you can ban one type of abortion procedure on viable fetuses, what logical reason can prevent you from banning another procedure, and then another? There isn’t one. Again, overturning would pretty much remove whatever teeth remain in the “undue burden” test.

I wish I could be more optimistic, but that’s how I see it. As a wise man once said, the re-election of Bush was always going to produce a lot of bad outcomes. This is one of them.

….As Jessica points out, the chilling effect of these laws on doctors is far from trivial.

…Shakes is equally pessimistic.

Getcher Hot Links!

Busy day today, so I direct you to these fine posts:

• In yet another vindication of the yoosta-bees who deride liberals who have actually remained liberals for failing to perceive the Bush administration’s profound commitment to freedom and individual rights, Seb notes that the United States has changed its position on whether to give UN consultative status to gay rights groups, joining the following bastions of liberal democracy: Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. There was something about freedom I think Bush doesn’t know…
• Publius has a very good discussion about what I thought was the most interesting part of Fukuyama’s article: his comparison of the (his word) “Marxism” of The End of History and the Last Man and the “Leninism” of the neocons. As Publius points out, that’s odd because TEOH didn’t have a particularly materialist conception of historical development, and moreover didn’t have a Marxist teleology; more than many critics of that book realized, he had a Straussian ambivalence about what he saw as the inevitable triumph of modernism.
• Dr. Prof. Mike Adams, Ph.D, vistits Penn State University. Hilarity ensues. The (good) Michael makes an important point about the declining share of state funding (and corresponding increasing tuition) at most “public” universities.
• Revisionist of the day: Dan Okrent.
• Thad points us to a very interesting essay by Alex Ross about Theodor Adorno’s music criticism. Although I’m sure gmack and others more versed in the Frankfurt School will set me straight, but my verdict about the music criticism of the man who in “[a] 1933 essay entitled “Farewell to Jazz” begins by noting that radio broadcasts of jazz have been banned in Nazi Germany, and goes on to say, in so many words, ‘Good riddance’” is pretty much “racist and classist know-nothing.”
• Oddly enough, when it can’t be used to recycle wingnut talking points Mickey Kaus’ theory of universal genetic revulsion for Teh Gay mysteriously vainshes…

A New Dudas

Congratulations to frequent commenters JRD and MJD on the birth of Andrew Michael Dudas. If there’s one thing this world needs, it’s another Dudas.

Golden Girls

I can express some unequivocal jingoistic pride in the women’s hockey team, who outscored their opponents 46-2 in the tournament…

Since I announced/scorekept a few games of McGill Martlets hockey, it was nice to see McGill’s Charline Labonte in net for the gold medal game. (It also brought back memories to see Cammi Granato–the American star when they won the gold medal in 1998–doing the color for NBC. She was playing for archrival Concordia when I was there, so I said her name together with “Concordia goal by le but de Concordia par” more times than I would have liked…)

…BTW, is it just me, or are those some butt-ugly gold medals?

82

While wandering Wikipedia, I discovered this interesting fact; only eighty-two veterans of World War I are still alive. I suppose that this shouldn’t be particularly surprising, given that the youngest is 102 years old. Having never given it much thought, though, I guess I expected that the number would be bigger.

For the record, this is the breakdown:

Living in Australia – 4 veterans
Living in Austria – 1 veteran
Living in Brazil – 1 veteran
Living in Canada – 2 veterans
Living in France – 10 veterans
Living in Hungary – 1 veteran
Living in Germany – 14 veterans
Living in Italy – 12 veterans
Living in Poland – 3 veterans
Living in Russia – 1 veteran
Living in the United Kingdom – 11 veterans
Living in USA – 22 veterans

I’m mildly surprised that the United States has the largest number of surviving veterans, given that US mobilization was smaller than that of the other major powers. On the other hand, World War II must have taken its toll of veterans in the European countries, and US participation in the war came fairly late.

In ten years, I suspect they’ll all be gone.