Ron Brownstein certainly nails it today in explaining why George W. Bush is running into some serious resistance to his “Nothing To See Here” line on the Dubai port sale:

President Bush may not like the arguments that critics are raising against the Dubai company attempting to take over cargo and cruise operations at ports in six U.S. cities. But he should recognize them. The arguments marshaled against Bush closely echoed the ones he deployed to defend the Iraq war. The president, in other words, is stewing in a pot he brought to boil.At the core of Bush’s case for invading Iraq was the contention that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed the burden of proof in evaluating potential threats. Bush justified the war, despite inconclusive intelligence about whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, largely on the grounds that after Sept. 11, waiting for definitive evidence of danger was itself too risky.

In other words, looks like the Bush may be guilty of a pre-9/11 mentality, eh? I bet Karl Rove will have the shelve that phrase for a bit.

It didn’t get much attention beyond a couple of vague statements urging Iraqis to stay calm and renounce violence, but the President of the United States did yet another of his series of Big Speeches about the War on Terror to the American Legion yesterday. I really urge you to slog your way through this long speech for what it says and leaves unsaid about the administration’s basic concept of the War on Terror more than four years after 9/11. Remarkably, given the major controversy of last week, and Bush’s extraordinary threat to use his first-ever presidential veto of any legislation that might interfere with a foreign government lease of major U.S. ports, there’s not a word in the Legion speech about port security or anything even vaguely related to such crucial ancillary issues as U.S. efforts to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. Instead, the whole thrust of Bush’s speech revolves around two propositions: (1) the familiar if bizarre claim that we’ve succeeded in bottling up every al Qaeda operative in the world in Iraq, guaranteeing our safety against another 9/11, even if it’s at the expense of the agony of Iraqis; and (2) the March of Freedom and Democracy is irresistably destroying terrorism around the world, except for a few speed bumps like Hamas’ election win in Palestine. I won’t even bother to address the first claim, but the second is a fine example of Bush’s tendency to harness entirely solid principles to the goal of spinning his administration’s most obvious failures. I couldn’t agree more than opening the Arab Middle East to political, civic and economic freedom is the long-term key to victory in the war against Jihadist terrorism. But the idea that this administration’s policies in Iraq have given its people freedom and democracy, with the only residual question being whether they are willing to accept these gifts, is ludicrous and offensive. Iraq’s agony right now is the direct result of a whole host of Bush administration mistakes. Indeed, just this week, Lawrence Kaplan of The New Republic suggested the most urgent reason for maintaining U.S. troop levels in Iraq is that the bungled “reconstruction” of the country has produced a failed or at least failing state in chaos. It would not only be refreshing if someone in the administration actually admitted this situation; it might even help convince Americans that an immediate withdrawal from Iraq could produce terrible results. But so long as the president himself acts as though the glass is not half-empty or even half-full, but nearly full, and that Americans should ignore the evidence before their eyes that Iraq is a mess, then no one should be surprised if support for further military engagement in Iraq continues to erode. Ultimately, people know when they’re being cynically spun.

As Kevin Drum (generally a dissenter against the drumbeat on the Dubai port lease) rightly points out, the current brouhaha will be very useful to the country if it draws greater attention to the ongoing and potentially disastrous weaknesses in the security of our ports. In today’s Washington Post, David Sanger explains the reality underneath the administration’s trust-us talk:

The administration’s core problem at the ports, most experts agree, is how long it has taken for the federal government to set and enforce new security standards — and to provide the technology to look inside millions of containers that flow through them.Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — “it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal,” said Mr. [Stephen] Flynn, the ports security expert.

Some of you may recall that John Kerry talked about this a lot during the last presidential campaign, to little avail. But then he didn’t have the kind of “news hook” supplied by the Dubai lease controversy, right? And that’s why it’s important right now that we move as quickly as possible from that hook to the underlying vulnerability of our ports to the most critical threat post by terrorists: a nuclear 9/11. Even, and perhaps especially, from a political point of view, showing that the president who proclaims himself the living embodiment of the War on Terror can’t be bothered to budget the money necessary to secure our ports is a lot more powerful an argument than highlighting his soft spot for big corporate contracts.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

You’d think the administration would just conduct a strategic retreat, admit it didn’t handle this too well, and agree to a more extended and less secret review of the security issues involved in the takeover of operations at six major U.S. ports by a company from Dubai. And maybe it will soon execute one of those classic Bush non-acknowledged flip-flops (see Department of Homeland Security, Intelligence Reform, Campaign Finance Reform, etc., etc.) and do just that.But for the moment, Bush is hanging tough, arguing that the criticism of this decision represents anti-Arab ethnic profiling, and actually threatening his first-ever presidential veto of any legislation that might overturn the Dubai port takeover.Aside from the rich irony of this line of argument from a president who has deliberately exploited stereotypes of Arabs in conflating the 9/11 attackers with Iraqis, there’s the little problem that Bush is avoiding the actual arguments of his critics. Today the DLC weighed in with a statement that stressed the simple if characteristic refusal of the administration to explain the process that led to its decision about port operations, and also reminded readers of the blind spot the Bushies have always exhibited towards port security. Others, including Matt Yglesias, emphasized the fact that the Dubai company at issue is essentially owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates–a fact that has also led Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Robert Menendez to introduce legislation focusing on state sponsorship of port operators, not their ethnicity.But I think Josh Marshall best described the absurdity of this particular president making a key homeland security decision based on an exquisite sensitivity to overseas opinion:

Even if he’s right on the merits, it just doesn’t work from a president who makes his political coin of the realm not caring what anybody else thinks or even what the law might be so long as security is even conceivably at stake.

Selah.

Another day–another very negative news story about the new Medicare “Part D” prescription drug benefit, this time from the Washington Post, where Ceci Connolly explains that even the very poor Americans targeted by the program are avoiding it like a cobra in a pill bottle. This finding is entirely in character with the benefit’s terrible history. Even back when it was new and shiny, and basically involved handing out prescription discount cards without premiums or other costs to beneficiaries, seniors didn’t like or trust the new program. The incredibly botched roll-out of the full Part D ball of twine has entrenched the perception of the program as a classic bureaucratic boondoggle, to the point that people who really need the benefit don’t much want it. (Check out TPMCafe’s subsite, Drug Bill Debacle, for ongoing lowlights).It takes a special breed of public officials to design and deliver a new entitlement program that nobody likes. Really, really special.

When I did my post yesterday welcoming the Bush administration’s apparent decision to push for a greater international peacekeeping presence in Darfur, I had not, unfortunately, read Mark Goldberg’s new article up at The American Prospect site. As Mark explains, there are all sort of signals that the U.S. is finally getting serious about Darfur, but the rest test of U.S. policy is whether the CIA goes along with efforts to bring to justice some of the worst perpetrators of the Darfur outrage, including at least one important “intelligence asset” in the Khartoum government.It’s reasonably clear by now that the threshold you have to cross to understand the Darfur disaster is to recognize that all the talk about racial or tribal conflict in the region is a smokescreen for a deliberate effort by the government of Sudan to neutralize Darfur once and for all as a “problem” for Khartoum, by the worst means possible. And as long as the U.S. fails to cross that threshold and keeps acting as though Khartoum is a part of the solution, and not the main problem, a small bump in peacekeeping forces won’t ultimately do much good.

This may be premature, but today’s news suggesting that the president is placing the U.S. behind a move to expand the international peacekeeping presence in Darfur is very welcome, and perhaps the first thing the man has done in, oh, a couple of years that I personally feel I can say something positive about.The proposal, according to Jim VandeHei and Colum Lynch of the Washington Post, is to match the current African Union force of 7,000 with 7,000 more troops under United Nations command, with NATO supplying logistical support for both. This kind of force can hardly stop the killing or starvation in Darfur, but it would save many lives, help provide international aid agencies with the security they need to stay involved, and perhaps ratchet up international pressure on the criminal government in Khartoum.Is this a flip-flop by Bush on Darfur? Here’s what the Posties says:

Bush brushed aside the resistance of some senior policymakers and sided with White House adviser Michael J. Gerson and others who have been lobbying for more assistance to Darfur. Bush this week also proposed $500 million for Darfur as part of a larger special budget request to Congress.There is some bipartisan support for intervening in the troubled region. Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) plan to introduce a resolution in Congress calling for NATO troops to help the African Union “stop the genocide” in the Darfur region.

In his remarkable book on Darfur, which I reviewed in the latest issue of Blueprint magazine, Gerard Prunier notes with some contempt that the Bush administration’s early interest in Darfur seemed to abruptly end once the 2004 elections ended. Maybe this is another election-year phenomenon, fed by Christian conservative interest in the subject. But if it leads to tangible help for the crucified people of Darfur, then I’m grateful for it.

Need something to get yourself really wide awake this morning? Check out Shankar Vedantam’s front-page story in today’s Washington Post about new scientific data on the melting of glaciers in Greenland, and the implications for sea levels and weather patterns. It’s like plunging an electric cattle prod into your morning bathwater.Here’s the lead:

Greenland’s glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth’s oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

Some of you may recall that the break-up of the Greenland ice cap was the hypothetical cause of all the calamaties depicted by Hollywood in The Day After Tomorrow. While that movie exaggerated and telescoped the potential impact of a big meltdown in Greenland, flooding of low-lying coastal areas all around the world and an accelerated increase in crazy, violent weather are real possibilities.You might think this ever-growing risk would be a very big deal to national policymakers, eh? But of course, the GOP Congress and the Bush administration have systematially rejected any course of actionthat might do some good, from participation in the Kyoto climate change negotiations, to a cap on carbon dioxide emissions, to action to improve automobile fuel efficiency.In particular, Bush’s “progress” on coming to grips with climate change has been, well, glacial. Early in his presidency, he denied there was any real evidence of human contribution to climate change. Towards the end of his first term, he grudgingly admitted something might be going on, but that doing anything about it was simply too expensive. Most recently, he’s embraced voluntary industry action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At this rate of response, we won’t get a serious national climate change policy until Pennsylvania has oceanfront property.The Post piece concludes with a nice quote about the new data on Greenland, from an eminently respectable source:

“This study underscores the need to take swift, meaningful actions at home and abroad to address climate change,” said Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

The data highlight the lack of meaningful U.S. policy, she added: “This is the kind of study that should make people stay awake at night wondering what we’re doing to the climate, how we’re shaping the planet for future generations and, especially, what we can do about it.”

If this news doesn’t make people in Washington stay “awake at night,” it should at least jolt them into attention in the morning.

There’s little doubt the Bush administration has long hoped that Americans would forget the word “Katrina” and all it connotes about a federal government asleep at the wheel, a president more interested in photo ops than action, the terrible human cost of incompetent government, the consequences of the “starve the beast” ideology, and the unkept promises made by the president himself on national television from Jackson Square. A report about to be released by a House Republican task force on the Katrina response–nicely amplified by a Senate Homeland Security Committee interrogation of a feckless Michael Chertoff–shows that even the most partisan GOP inquiry into the disaster produces stomach-churning revulsion and serious fears about the federal government’s ability to deal with a future terrorist attack. You can read about it in today’s New Dem Dispatch. If the Bushies were praying for a distraction from the vice president’s Lethal Weapon ’06 drama, the Good Lord answered them quite righteously.

I first heard about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident via a scratchy A.M. radio transmission last night, and no kidding, my first thought was: Dick Cheney shoots a lawyer…. I didn’t know the Onion had a radio show.Now I don’t want to make light of an incident that nearly cost someone his life, but it did remind me that Master Hunter Cheney took the lead back in 2004 in mocking John Kerry for hunting geese on the campaign trail:

“My fellow sportsmen, this cover-up isn’t going to work,” Cheney said, speaking to supporters in an upscale Toledo suburb that borders the Ohio-Michigan state line. “The Second Amendment is more than just a photo opportunity.”The National Rifle Association has endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket.Kerry has a camouflage jacket but bought a new one for the outing because he was on the campaign trail. Cheney seized on the fact that the jacket was new.”Which did make me wonder how regularly he does go goose hunting,” the vice president said.

You can only imagine what Cheney would have said if Kerry had splattered a bystander with buckshot. But more to the point, maybe the NRA should offer its lifelong ally one of those Eddie Eagle gun safety courses before he’s allowed to return to the woods with shooting irons.