Making Waves

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 10:37 AM

I've been trying to dope out how the UAE port security deal became the white-hot political story of the moment.

Here's what I've discovered.

On Feb. 12, the AP moved a story that began: "A company in the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over significant operations at six American ports as part of a corporate sale, leaving a country with ties to the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers with influence over a maritime industry considered vulnerable to terrorism."

Know what else happened on Feb. 12? A certain ranch owner called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times to say that a certain senior administration official had accidentally shot his hunting buddy. And for the next week, the media cared about little else, culminating in this week's Time and Newsweek cover stories.

But the story was percolating along. Last Wednesday, Feb. 15, a Washington Times editorial asked: "Do we really want our major ports in the hands of an Arab country where al Qaeda recruits, travels and wires money?"

On Thursday, a New York Times editorial said the administration had taken "laxness to a new level" by allowing Dubai Ports World to run significant operations at six ports, including the one in New York. The next day, The Washington Post, which had run the AP wire five days earlier, in effect tried again with a staff-written story:

"The management of major U.S. ports taken over by an Arab-owned company? What was the Bush administration thinking when it allowed such a thing?"

The Times tried again too that day, with this story: "The Bush administration dismissed the security concerns of local officials yesterday and restated its approval of a deal that will give a company based in Dubai a major role in operating ports in and around New York City."

Then some Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, ripped the administration, and since the Cheney story was fading, a new controversy was born.

Now at this point, the conservative bloggers usually weigh in and tell the left-wing moonbats to stop playing politics with national security and leave the White House alone. But that didn't happen, and soon Republicans George Pataki and Bill Frist were jumping on the anti-Dubai bandwagon.

Michelle Malkin was out there early, saying: "The buck stops with the White House. The president has the ultimate authority to stop the deal. And he should . . . My bottom line is that the deal looks bad and smells worse."

Tom Bevan at conservative Real Clear Politics is also appalled:

"Does anyone outside of the administration believe selling outsourcing the operation of our ports to the UAE is a good idea? Sure doesn't seem that way. Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Robert Menendez are against it, as are Republican Governors George Pataki and Robert Ehrlich, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rep. Peter King (R-NY), as well as a host of others.

"Yet the administration had Michael Chertoff out defending the deal on the Sunday shows, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales doing the same today in Birmingham, Alabama. I'm not well versed on the potential merits of the deal, but irrespective of whether it might be good policy it is darn sure terrible politics. It's surprising the White House couldn't see this from the beginning, and even more surprising they can't see it now. It feels a bit like a rerun of the Harriet Miers nomination where the administration dug its heels despite knowing within hours it had made a grave mistake.

"The port deal is potentially even more damaging politically to the president because it strikes at one of his few remaining core political assets: the public's perception of Bush as an aggressive fighter of terrorism and staunch defender of America."

Craig Crawford says the stakes are extremely high:

"Republicans will lose control of Congress if President Bush does not immediately reverse the decision to allow an Arab-owned company (with ties to his administration) to operate major U. S. ports. Fearing a deadly depression in November's conservative voter turnout (already in play over Bush's immigration policies), House Republican leaders are lining up to fight the White House on this one -- and outside the Beltway, dissent rises from GOP governors in affected states . . .

"But will Democrats take full advantage and risk appearing xenophobic?"

I'm still wondering how much of a threat all this is, since the Emirates are a U.S. ally. But it's clearly a political threat to the White House.

The morning papers are all over the port saga, now that Bush has dug in his heels.

"President Bush said Tuesday that he would veto any legislation seeking to block the administration's decision to allow a state-owned company from Dubai to assume control of port terminals in New York and other cities," reports the New York Times .

"Mr. Bush's rare veto threat came as Republican leaders and many of their Democratic counterparts called up today for the port takeover to be put on hold . . .

"The White House appeared stunned by the uprising, over a transaction that they considered routine -- especially since China's biggest state-owned shipper runs major ports in the United States, as do a host of other foreign companies."

Los Angeles Times : "In the face of growing Republican opposition, President Bush today threatened to veto any congressional effort to block a deal that will allow an Arab company to take over the management of six major U.S. seaports, saying that any attempt to scuttle the arrangement would send 'a terrible signal to friends around the world.' "

Wall Street Journal: "With the president's popularity flagging, the White House faces a real risk that opposition from the House and Senate leadership, fanned by the administration's Democratic adversaries, could lead to Congressional legislation blocking the deal."

The unnamed sources have their knives out: "Several Bush-administration security officials expressed concerns yesterday that terrorists could infiltrate seaports through a United Arab Emirates company that is vying to manage six U.S. ports," says the Washington Times .

Don't miss the Snow angle: "The administration signed off on the deal after it was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel chaired by Treasury Secretary John Snow," says the Philadelphia Inquirer .

"Snow was chairman of CSX, a rail firm that, according to the New York Daily News, sold its own port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, a year after Snow left to head Treasury."

The headline on this Jonathan Alter column in Newsweek might be "CHENEY TO MEDIA: DROP DEAD":

"Cheney believes in what might be called partisan accountability--you answer only to your own side, on your own terms, not to the jackals of the mainstream media . . .

"Fears of terrorism made his decision to go to an 'undisclosed location' understandable, but he has taken secrecy about his whereabouts to inexplicable lengths. News organizations went along with this partly to save money by not sending reporters to cover his trips. They rationalized it by explaining that Cheney never said anything to reporters anyway.

"His message to the Washington press corps is the same as the one he delivered to Sen. Patrick Leahy in the Senate cloakroom, when the Democrat had the temerity to criticize him: 'Go [blank] yourself.' By not holding a press conference since 2002, Cheney is telling the men and women assigned to cover the White House that they are irrelevant. No wonder they went crazy after learning of the shooting accident from a Texas paper . . .

"We'll see how Sean Hannity likes it when a future Democratic president or vice president gives interviews only to NPR and The Nation."

New Republic Editor Peter Beinart slams television coverage of Iraq, noting that "Jaafari's selection [as prime minister] sparked little discussion in the broadcast media. It made the front page of Monday's New York Times and Washington Post, but, in the mysterious alchemy that converts print news into network news, the Jaafari story almost disappeared. According to transcripts, it received less than a paragraph of text on ABC's 'World News Tonight Sunday' and 'Fox News Sunday.' And those were the responsible outlets. CBS's and NBC's Sunday evening broadcasts didn't mention Jaafari's selection at all.

"Americans deserve better. The argument about how fast and under what conditions to pull U.S. troops from Iraq has quieted for the moment, but it will return with a vengeance in the run-up to the 2006 elections. It's a highly partisan, ideologically freighted debate--but, as much as possible, it should be dictated by events on the ground in Iraq. The Bush administration obviously cannot be trusted to portray those events to the public in an honest way. That leaves the mass media, and the mass media is doing a lousy job."

That's are doing a lousy job.

"Part of the problem is the structure of cable news. The typical format is a debate between two people, one liberal and one conservative. It requires little expertise from the participants and conveys little information to the audience. It works best for familiar, hotly contested domestic issues like abortion and gay marriage, where the audience already knows what it thinks.

"Iraq can be approached this way, too: Did Bush lie? Will it hurt him in 2006? Could the Democrats do better? All these debates work well on television because they're about us. The Jaafari story, by contrast, is unintelligible precisely because it's not about us. There's no preordained partisan story line. What the viewer needs is less opinion than information, less heat than light. And that's just what our cable talk shows rarely provide."

Cheney's little problem has set off lots of new-veep speculation, and National Review's John Miller says:

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is perhaps the likeliest choice for Bush: He trusts her and no doubt believes she would carry on his foreign-policy vision, which is how his presidency will be remembered in history, for better or worse. Although she has never held elective office, she is certainly qualified for the job -- more so, in fact, than a lot of Washington's current officeholders.

"Beyond that, Bush may find the idea of selecting a black woman to be irresistible. You can almost hear Karl Rove whispering in his ear, 'Condi wins in 2008 -- and this cements your legacy as a president whose agenda, upon leaving office, was affirmed by the voters once again. It's the next-best thing to a third term.'

"For conservatives, Rice would be a cause for concern primarily because she is a blank slate on domestic issues. On abortion, she has said she is pro-choice; on racial preferences, she seems to be at least a moderate supporter of affirmative action. Neither of these is a good sign, though the latter may not matter much in an electoral sense. Her stance on abortion, however, could pose real problems, both for her and for conservatives.

"It is entirely possible that she would surprise and delight suspicious pro-lifers: Many of them would want to like her, and she could speak broadly about the culture of life, adopting much of Bush's rhetoric. She could also signal that she is operationally pro-life on the most pressing issues, from judicial selection to legislation that bans partial-birth abortion. Yet conservatives aren't looking to be surprised and delighted. Their very temperament calls for something else: They would prefer a veep with a proven track record -- not just on abortion, but on any number of issues. Where does Rice stand on federal spending? On tax cuts? On welfare reform? On gay marriage? Conservatives won't want to feel trapped between their guesses and their hopes.

"And this could lead to a political disaster for the GOP. What if Vice President Rice sought the party's presidential nomination in 2008 -- but that Republican primary voters rejected her for a true-blue pro-lifer? Suddenly, Bush's legacy burnishing would backfire."

In other words, be careful what you wish for.

Scooter Libby now has a Web site for his legal defense fund, describing him as "one of the unsung heroes in fighting the war on terror."

Used to be, you'd promise a source anonymity and just keep his or her name out of the paper. Now Techdirt reports on a Washington Post piece on a computer hacker, "one young botnet herder, who remained nameless (other than an online handle). Part of the agreement he apparently made with the Washington Post was that his small town not be identified either. The article contains a few random details which could apply to just any number of small towns throughout the country -- so they seemed safe enough. However, there was also a tightly cropped photo designed to not really give away any info in the image. Unfortunately, as many people have learned, there's more than meets the eye when it comes to data associated with digital files, and it didn't take long for some Slashdot readers to take a gander at the photo's metadata, and work out the probable location of the young man.

"Some are wondering if the Washington Post (who famously kept Deep Throat's identity secret for three decades) may now face some sort of liability should the individual actually be revealed through this bit of metadata sleuthing."

Finally, is the NYT blowing off intern applicants from a Rutgers professor who has criticized the paper? Here's the incriminating e-mail, and the scoop .