Hello. I am an American, and apparently, I'm stupid. Or a sheep.

Thanks to the uninformed masses concentrating on things that aren't important, the Dubai Port World deal has been 'modified'. They will turn over control of the six U.S. ports to a 'U.S. concern'. I have no idea what that means, and frankly I don't care.

I need to understand how it is that the American people can get so worked up over this issue, yet completely ignore things that will actually impact their lives. If folks would get this hot and bothered over warrentless wiretaps, the Patriot Act, and dumb-as-nails foreign policy I doubt those issues would survive. Instead, the sheep of American take the media line, and get worked up over what exactly? Who pays the longshoremen? The logo on a building? The Dubai Ports World detail would have had a negligible impact on port security - it's abysmal even without an Middle Eastern Company controlling terminal contracts - yet everyone reacted as if we were giving Osama Bin Laden a free pass to import anything he wanted.

Hey! Wake the fuck up! I supposed everyone forgot about the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Coast Guard. Not a great endorsement of public confidence in those agencies, eh?

I can easily see why President Bush was taken off guard on this one. It's a non-starter, a throw away, a non-issue. But Democrats need an issue, any issue (or non-issue) that they can whip into a froth and then claim that they are "tougher on terrorism" than the GOP. Partisan politics at it's best. Republicans got on board the protest once their offices started getting deluged with e-mail, phone calls, and letters from their constituents - you know, the people who elect them.

It boggles my mind. Really.