There's just a certain "unthinking-ness" on the left. They exist on platitudes and prepackaged assumptions. Anything Bush does is wrong and if they don't know why, they'll invent a reason.

Some years ago a couple moved into a house out on the main road. I was incredibly unimpressed with them at our initial meeting, so I've not gone out of my way to get to know them. They claim to train race horses--I suspect they probably muck out the stables. Their property abuts ours in the back and they maintain an amazing collection of animals on their property. Three steers, four horses, 29 goats and an indeterminate number of chickens, dogs and rabbits. They don't milk or eat any of the animals--they simply collect them.

Saturday we were working in the yard and a number of people walked into the goat pen. For some reason my wife felt obligated to go down and have a neighborly chat. I stayed away for a while, then finally broke down and joined her. At that point most of the people (who apparently were boarding an animal there for a 4H project) departed, leaving just the woman who lived there. We talked for a bit and I was beginning to feel guilty about having written her off as a moron when she started on politics.

Utterly clueless, she started ranting about the now failed deal to have a UAE-based firm administer US ports. She shouted "How could Bush not have known it was an Arab firm? What an idiot". At that point I declared my arthritic knee was bothering me and headed for the house.

Bush knew damn well the company was from the UAE. Hell, he pushed the whole idea. Now, I disagree with him on it, but I can offer cogent reasons for my disagreement--not an utterly fabricated reason just because I hate Bush, ergo everything he does is wrong.

I disagree because handing control of ports also means handing over knowlege of security procedures and response capabilities to a firm that more than likely will be populated with Islamists, or at least people sympathetic to Islamists. But that's too much for people of her intellect to grasp. She can't even wrap her mind around the fact that Bush was fully aware of where the company is based. She justs hates Bush, and that makes it so.