Blackmail Pure and Simple

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who is running as hard as he can for Prez in 2008 said something provocative on George Steph’s This Week show yesterday. And for McCain, who comes across like a Method Actor doing a “bland and boring” exercise, provocative is a stretch. However, McCain was babbling on about the Dubai deal being just fine and that even though the UAE wasn’t our friend before 9/11, it became righteous immediately after 9/11 and now the country is benign and never ever would harm us and is our new best friend blah-blah-blah. Then he said that the UAE had helped the US out in another way. For some reason George Steph did not press McCain for details. WHAT exactly is this other way that the UAE has served the US? More to the point, what has the UAE done that makes it incumbent on George W. Bush to hand over US ports without a murmur? After spending the weekend with execs from Dubai Ports World, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services John W. Warner (R-VA) said, “We cannot mess this deal up…if the U.A.E. felt that they're being mistreated, and were to pull back that support, where would it shift? We know not." So McCain implies the UAE has done classified who-knows-what ops for the US that are so important (unmentionable) that we owe turning over our ports to them. And Warner comes right out and says if we don’t do whatever the UAE asks of us, the UAE will give its support to our enemies. Warner added, “We as the United States are dependent on countries like the U.A.E., Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, all of them there, to give us the support to fight this war on terrorism." Last Tuesday the Prez said, "This is a company that has played by the rules.” Out of the murk and double-talk, a picture is beginning to emerge. And that picture is worth a thousand words like “blackmail, extortion, hostage, ransom, payoff, threat, coercion, knee-capping and cement shoes”. Apparently, the UAE (and Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and all of “them”) are willing to play by the rules as outlined by The Carlyle Group, the Pentagon, the White House Iraq Group, William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century, and Karl Rove’s plan to make an ignorant mental defective King of the World, as long as the US pays its respects and ponies up the required vigorish. Which, in the Dubai case means acting as though the UAE is a friend and turning over our ports to Dubai Ports World. It’s called the Protection Racket. And the entire GOP is in on it. But the GOP is pissed that the deal wasn’t handled with more class and finesse. Sorry guys, class and finesse just don’t go hand in hand with 60-year-old hookers stinking from five-minute-dates in foreign legation rent-a-cars.