BCT Editorial – 2/24/06

This page was last updated on February 25, 2006.

Blowback; Editorial; Beaver County Times; February 24, 2006. As of this writing, this editorial was published in the print edition but not on the Times website.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“He who lives by the scare tactic dies by the scare tactic.”

[RWC] This reminds me of the saying about how people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Review past editorials and you’ll find fear is a common tactic of the Times.

“Such is the case of President Bush and the takeover of shipping operations at six U.S. ports by a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates.”

[RWC] By design, this isn’t a very good description of the transaction. Last year, a UAE company, DP World, tendered an offer to buy P&O, a U.K. company that among other things operates some cargo terminals in six U.S. ports and in other countries, including the U.K. P&O doesn’t control the ports. The appropriate port authorities – like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – retain control and the Coast Guard, U.S. Customs Service, and Homeland will continue to provide security as they do now.

“Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, Bush, administration officials and the Republican Party in general have gotten a huge amount of political mileage by using the Arab/9-11 bogeyman to scare Americans into supporting the White House’s domestic and foreign agendas.”

[RWC] Translation: “We liberals want you ignorant citizens to forget the attacks of the past decade took place because we know you no longer trust us when it comes to national security, but those fearmongering Republicans wouldn’t let us rewrite history.”

So let me get this correct. Arabs didn’t attack us on 9/11, or the USS Cole in 2000, or the World Trade Center in 1993, or U.S. embassies in Africa, et cetera? Boogeymen aren’t real; the Arabs who have attacked us for more than a decade are very real.

“They did that because it is always easier to scare people into being against your opponent than it is to convince them to support you.”

[RWC] This reads like projection to me. That is, liberals can’t convince anyone to follow them unless they use scare tactics so they assume conservatives must use the same tactic, not that today’s Republicans are conservatives.

Let’s review. In 2000, we were told black churches would burn if Republicans were elected. During every election cycle we’re told Socialist Security and Medicare will disappear if Republicans are in power. The examples go on and on.

“So when the sale of the port business to Dubai Ports World became public, it’s no wonder so many Americans – including, believe it or not, some congressional Republicans – reacted with alarm. They could not fathom how the Bush administration could sanction a sale that could, in their minds, increase the possibility of terrorism at American ports.”

[RWC] While the group responsible for reviewing/approving the deal dropped the political ball on this, the media – both conservative and liberal - didn’t do their job either. Instead of investigating and presenting the facts, the media’s idea of “reporting” was simply to report the hysterical reactions of politicians.

“The reaction so spooked the president that he actually took the rare step of calling reporters to his conference room on Air Force One to defend the sale, going as far as to say he would veto efforts in Congress to black the agreement.”

[RWC] “Spooked the president?” Yeah, right.

“But what did Bush expect? He’s experiencing a variation of ‘blowback,’ which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as ‘the effect caused by the recirculation into the source country of disinformation previously planted abroad by that country’s intelligence service in an effort to mislead the government of another country.’”

[RWC] Wow, talk about a bad reach!

Ignoring everything else that’s wrong with trying to force this analogy, what is the disinformation? Have not primarily Arab terrorists been attacking us for over a decade? Were not three Arabs living in Toledo indicted earlier this week for conspiring to attack our troops in Iraq and to assassinate President Bush? What about the Lackawanna Six? Five of the six were born and raised in the U.S. but were of Arab descent. The examples go on and on.

For clarification, I don’t believe all Arabs are terrorists any more than I believe all people whose last name is McVeigh are bombers. It would be foolish, however, to ignore the fact that most of the terrorists trying to kill us are Arabs or of Arab descent.

Remember, liberals tend to refer to the truth as disinformation because the truth is not a friend to liberals.