Remember the Whole Dubai Terminal Lease Deal Brouhaha?

Good grief I do. Big Lizards brings us this interesting bit of news that perhaps Bush knew what he was doing. Quoting the Washington Times:

Former Inside the Ring co-author Rowan Scarborough has written a new book revealing a key reason the Bush administration pressed hard for the 2006 deal for the United Arab Emirates-based Dubai Ports World to take over management of several U.S. ports.
According to Mr. Scarborough, the administration wanted the deal to go through because the UAE government had agreed to let the United States post agents inside its global port network who could report on world shipping.
Dubai Ports currently runs port facilities at key U.S. intelligence targets, including Venezuela, China, Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia.
"Dubai Ports, in essence, was going to become an agent of CIA," Mr. Scarborough said in an interview. "The arrangement is helping us detect whether any kind of terror contraband was being moved around."

Well that would have been nice wouldn't it. However the far right, direct mail, talk radio, and others went on rampage.

I have always been suspcious of how this "outrage" over the deal occured. First, it breaks while Bush was abroad on a very important India trip. The bipartisian make up of the opposition and who they were initally has always made me concerned. This is was also the point I starting asking questions about talk radio and especially some of the major "conservative bloggers" that people link and spread across the net. I love blogs. I think political blogs are very needed and have transformed our political landscape for the better. However has it occured to anyone that some widely read conservative bloggers might be paid to push a point of view? For some reason this never enters people's minds. To even mention the fact is some betrayal.

In the end there was something too neat and coordinated about the opposition and how quickly it sprang. Before you knew it the mob was raging and we were having a diplomatic incident on our hands.

Going back down memory lane, you will perhaps remember that a tentative agreement was struck that a 45 day hearing would take place. A time to fully investigate the concerns. The military that was for the deal was for it and so were American businessmen in the UAE that just happened to be on a plane to DC. However this was not enough. It had to be killed right then. Why?

Has anyone ever investigated who got those leases in the end?

Bush suffered a defeat and it was largely from his supposed "base". I recall quite clearly being told how defeating this deal would assure GOP victory later that year. Well that didn't work out.

The Anchoress in a post that cause quite a stir because it told some hard truths to my fellow conservative and republicans said in part:
...Bush, unchanged in essentials, might have wondered if his conservative “base” had become a bit over-confident and loose-hipped, so cock-sure of their majority (not that congress used it) so certain of their own brilliance that they were beginning to believe they didn’t need him; that he wasn’t conservative enough, after all, and that the next president was going to be the solid, “uncompassionate” conservative they’d really wanted all along.
The president who had delivered one gift after another to his base asked them to trust him, and his base sneered.
Then of course, the DPW debacle was launched and once again the far-right, his “base” went beserk, again, for very dubious reasons. Buster was the one who pointed out to me, then, that in this matter President Bush was being entirely consistent with who he had always been and that his defense of the sale was not unsound, nor unprecedented. The right didn’t care! They stomped their feet and went DU again. Even Rush Limbaugh couldn’t control them. The left, on the other hand, which should have supported the president - they would have had he been anyone else - simply exploited what they could of it

Now we learn that there were even more reasons to support it perhaps. Reasons that President Bush could not say in public for obvious reasons. Perhaps instead of listening to Sean Hannity and Marl Levin rant on about the UAE and the State of Israel, we should have listened to the clues that Israel was trying to give us themselves. But all that was lost in the hysteria. From that Savage moron on the radio to Lou Dobbs to politicans that wanted tv time all rational discussion was drowned out. Which seems what some people wanted!!!

Who benefited? Perhaps someone should go check that out. I have a sinking feeling that President Bush and in the end we the American people got screwed.