Cutting off your nose to spite your allies

I have not the time, patience or expertise to blog about an army of Davids uniting to participate in the stoning of those whose leadership in a representative democracy fell short of expectations in today's rising tide of neo-populism.

(Got that? Read it through a time or two more if you didn't because it has more than one thought. Such prose is out of fashion these days because it is written with both nuance and complexity in order to express more than one level of thinking. In other words, it's more than a soundbite.)

Our representatives have spoken, responding to a rising chorus of constituents whipped into a frenzy by a gale of xenophobia, isolationism and shrill patriotism (but not racism, mind you).
Words fail me. So go read....

THIS..............THIS..........THIS..............THIS..............and finally, THIS.


President Bush tried to do the right thing on the Dubai ports deal, but he got rolled by a runaway Congress. The collapse of the deal was a measure of Bush's political weakness -- but even more, of America's traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics. The ironic fact is that the UAE is precisely the kind of Arab ally the United States needs most now. But that clearly didn't matter to an election-year Congress, which responded to the Dubai deal with a frenzy of Muslim-bashing disguised as concern about terrorism. And we wonder why the rest of the world doesn't like us. (From that first link,)