This post from Talking Points Memo brought back to mind the things that has been dancing around in my mind since the whole “ports thing” broke.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: February 19, 2006 – February 25, 2006 Archives

From a TPM Reader BR from Houston:
Being a War President, and the War on Terror itself, eclipses everything.

Except when it doesn’t.

The people who voted for him genuinely believed that he would keep them safer than any alternative we could elect. And now he’s blowing it all off, under the guise of “fair play” for countries that have “played by the rules.” Aside from the cribbing from Clinton, just which rules is it he thinks the UAE has played by?

The cynicism of his defense of the port deal is just staggering. He’s not even interested in pretending he didn’t know, or hadn’t considered the psychological ramifications, etc. Not even a nod to “maybe we should review this one more time.”

Could be it’s money—there is clearly some conflict of interesting running around the Treasury Dept.

But maybe they just don’t care. It’s all been a show, from day one. Or, I should say, Day 911.

I hope this knocks some sense into Republican heads. From what I heard on Sean Hannity today, perhaps it has.

As I indicate in the title to this post, this seems to be like a new chapter for the book House of Bush, House of Saud, which chronicles the history of the long-standing relationship between the Bush family and the United Arab Emirates. I’m not at all convinced that Bush didn’t know anything about this. It came as a surprise to me that the White House is now saying Bush didn’t know. It seemed in keeping with the seemingly irrational protection the Bush administration afffords to the Saudis after 9/11. If the Saudis and the Neocons are in such a mesh of relationships, the ports thing is just one more of those “favors” that get passed around as rewards; a part of the whole “Money laundering” , political-legitimizing (or the attempt to make it so) by the PR machine of the Bush administration. That whole history is what arouses my skepticism about the claim he didn’t know. Of course, I don’t know why they think that “not knowing” is at all a flattering portrayal of Bush’s competence as president. Maybe they figure that ….