We live in a country whose citizens contentedly surrender nail clippers and Swiss Army knives to board an airplane, and accept as standard operating procedure body searches of white-haired grannies in the name of flight security. Could anyone have predicted that the sale of Britain’s Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company to Dubai Ports World giving authority over terminals in ports in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia to an Islamic-controlled company might produce alarm?

The democrats astutely recognize an opportunity to score off the Bush Administration again, and even ultra-liberals like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer are leaping aboard a rapidly accelerating juggernaut of opposition to the commercial surrender of US ports to the paynim.

But suppose the administration had played it the other way. Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, holds a press conference denouncing the sale, and calls for Congressional action to overturn the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) rubberstamp approval of the British sale. The next day’s editorials in the Times and Washington Post denounce the anti-Islamic bigotry of the Bush Administration, noting that Dubai is, in fact, a US ally in the War on Terror, that the port terminals were previously foreign-owned, and that the only other bidder was a Singapore company. Democrat leaders in Congress attack the administration in press conferences held at mosques.

By acquiescing compliantly to the deal, Rove has put Crusading fire into the democrat opposition’s belly, and persuaded prominent leaders of the Congressional left to march in Michelle Malkin’s parade.

Any day now, Karl is going to get Bush to announce his intention to outlaw coercive interrogations of Islamic terrorists, and we are going to see Hillary Clinton acting like Jack Bauer, promising personally to make every single one of the rascals talk.