Andrew McCarthy wrote on Thursday in National Review Online that, while the port security situation is indeed a serious and perhaps even dangerous misstep by the administration, Hillary's involvement in the issue is, at best, rather hypocritical.
For example, Hillary wants to introduce legislation that prohibits any foreign country or company from owning American ports, even though - like it or not - this is the way that things have been operating for at least the last couple of decades.
In fact, Communist China, notes McCarthy, is one of the nation's that controls several port operations on the West Coast. And the ChiComs would be controlling even more of our ports if Hillary's husband had his way, were it not for the GOP-controlled Congress.
McCarthy reminds us that in 1998, Republicans in the Senate and House stopped President Clinton from selling a terminal at the former U.S. Naval Station in Long Beach to the Chinese Ocean Shipping Company - "a subsidiary of the People's Liberation Army linked to arms trading to Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba, and even the street gangs of Los Angeles."
McCarthy also points out that the Clinton administration had no problem doing business with the United Arab Emirates when it was in power, including by selling $8 billion worth of highly advanced weaponry to the UAE.
This sale occurred in 2000, when we should have had an idea that the UAE had links to terrorism: "For those keeping score, that's less than two years after al Qaeda blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It is one year after the Clinton administration had Osama bin Laden targeted at a camp in Afghanistan ... but called the strike off because the al Qaeda chief was in the company of high UAE officials, including an Emirati prince. A few months later, while the Clinton folks were getting the UAE its new military hardware, the regime's friends at al Qaeda were blowing up the U.S.S. Cole."
In the end, it appears that Sen. Clinton has just seen an opportunity to position herself to the right of the President (and many Republicans) on the war on terror, just as her husband did - successfully - during the 1992 campaign when he accused Bush 41 of "coddling dictators" in Red China. And we all know how that turned out.
