Skar how can you blame just the Democrats for torpedoing the port deal when the majority of the republican party did the exact same thing?
I'm not blaming only the democrats for torpedoing the ports deal. Perhaps I was less than clear (heaven knows that's been a problem of mine in the past) but what I was pointing out was that the democrats reversed their position on national security over the issue because (as far as I could tell) it was a chance to politically hurt the republicans. They have been claiming that the Republicans simply hate all arabs, lied to get into the war because they hate all arabs, and are racist in their attitudes towards arabs. Now, suddenly they have an opportunity to jab a Republican president over a percieved national security issue and they reverse themselves. Suddenly the ports deal was bad for no better reason than "arabs would be controlling our ports." As I said, the democrats had nothing credible to say, they just screamed ARAB and made hay. I didn't blame the democrats for torpedoing the ports deal, I blamed them for engaging in mindless fearmongering, which very thing they have been accusing the Republicans of for years now. It doesn't even matter whether they were right to accuse the Republicans of that, that discussion has been had more than once too many times on this forum. I was merely pointing out that their behavior was internally inconsistent.
You should expect the party not in power to do everything to press a percived advantage, If the tables were reversed, like under Clinton the Republicans would have been howling for blood and an impeachment preceeding. What stunned me was how willing the republicans were to cut and run from the president over it.
On the contrary I expect any party to at least behave in a consistent manner, rather than reversing themselves in order to ride on every passing zephyr of political advantage. One is now left to wonder whether the democratic party thinks we should treat arabs as real people (which is the stand they take to oppose the war and accuse the Republicans of NOT doing) or whether we should treat them as an untrustworthy racial whole (which is the stand they took over the ports deal). The Democrats are/were being false in at least one of those mutually exclusive stands. That leads one to wonder if they are ever true since they play the crowd so casually.
I don't think the Republicans who broke with the Pres. had any more credible reason for objecting to the ports deal than the democrats, they certainly didn't present a more compelling case. But they at least weren't reversing themselves on the national security issue.