Liberal Talk Radio

The Dubai Port fiasco almost makes you want to have sympathy for the president, the way that congressional Republicans are abandoning him en masse to score cheap xenophobia points.

Almost.

You could imagine the scene in the Oval Office as if it were unruly House Democrats on The West Wing, with Josh and Toby running around screaming about why their party won’t shut up and get in line.

But the sad truth is is that the President has brought this xenophobic backlash on himself. For the past five years, he’s been telling America that the entire Middle East can be painted with the same brush: that Saddam and Al Qaida were one and the same, and that (in the classic flypaper theory) we were fighting “them” (Al Qaida terrorists?) over “there” (Iraq?), so we don’t have to fight “them” (al-Zarqawi?) here at “home” (New York?).

Time and time again President Bush, Vice President Cheney, their surrogates and allies sold the Iraq war as a way to end nefarious plot between a relatively secular “rogue” state (Iraq) and a stateless terrorist group (Al Qaeda). It was this shameful generalizing of the Middle East that convinced some 70 percent of Americans, wrongly, that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. He continually brought the heartland’s blood to a boil, to the point where typically isolationist Middle America supported the bombing of Baghdad as a just retribution for all those innocent Americans killed on 9/11.

Now, in 2006, Bush wants us to recognize the subtlety. He wants us to know that all Arabs are not the same, that there’s a difference between a nation-state and a terrorist group. That we should be be cautious and deliberate in assuming that a nation-state (in this case, the UAE) has ties to terror.

Unfortunately for the President, the U.S.S. Rational Subtlety left port on January 29, 2002, loaded with domestic cargo marked “Axis of Evil,” and hasn’t been seen since.