The thing that bugs me about the way this port management issue is playing out on the blogs is, they’re acting just like the old media. They see the words “ports” and “Arabs” in the same sentence and explode in bloviation — either calling racism on the one side, or decrying the breech of national security on the other (and never mind that the usual sides are all jumbled up here).

When it’s clear that nobody doing the loudest talking knew doodly-squat about ports governance, ports management, port security, the Container Security Initiative, the longshoreman’s union, the role of a terminal operator in security versus that of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or even the difference between a port and a cargo terminal.

Instead, they all locked into extreme positions at the word “go,” and since then they’ve been furiously digging through all the information they neglected beforehand, fetching up whatever fragments bolster their already-committed positions, and discarding the rest.

Folks, this is not how you learn anything, and this is not how you arrive at a coherent position on a complicated issue. And I thought we already had Old Media for this.

Ending all private involvement in the operation of the ports won’t make any difference. The government is already in charge of security at the ports. Changing security clearances for crane operators might make some slight difference in security if you really think that the job presents more of security risk than the government currently does. However, I don’t see why that would require ending private involvement for all positions at the ports.

While I think it’s absolutely imperitive that we keep the ports secure as best we can, it’s really an issue of getting lucky and hoping for the best.

If we want to be more secure from the threat of nuclear weapons being detonated on our soil, we do it by not letting anyone untrustworthy have nuclear weapons in the first place.