Dick Cheney: Jedi Master

The stunt that the Bush administration is pulling with this Dubai ports deal is simply genius (and of course, terribly disgusting from a political point of view).

About a month after I had gotten the job at Factiva, the recruiter that had brokered the deal called me up and took me out to lunch.  During that time, he had told me that one of the practices that they use when presenting candidates was to position the presentation in such a way that the client would see a few below par candidates to set up a candidate so that the last few candidates would all seem to be way above average.  In a sense, I was a closer in that there was no way that I could fail this interview given the setup that they performed (not that I needed it, the recruiter called and notified me that they hired me before I could even get back to my house, 20 minutes away).

This was confirmed to me by experience last year when I went in for an interview with JPMorganChase.  My goodness.  The guy they had lined up before me (due to a scheduling snafu, we both ended doing a “group interview” together) was a total moron.  Short guy.  Bad presentation.  Stuttering.  His main claim was that he built a website for his church using ColdFusion.  Wow.  Not to come off like an arrogant prick (which I probably am :-D), there was no way that this guy was going to even come close to getting the job over me.  (I declined, though, because I didn’t like the manager and the environment didn’t seem right for me.)

So what does all of this have to do with the Dubai ports deal?  It’s fairly obvious that this has been planned all along by the Bush administration and in particularly, Dick Cheney as a setup for Halliburton to step in and take over control of the ports.  Could you imagine the outcry and resistance from the Democratic party and consipiracy theorists had they initially offered this deal to Halliburton?  The entire act was great.  Bush threatening veto (the man hasn’t vetoed a single bill to pass his desk) was such a dead giveaway to the entire act and yet the public and the news outlets bought it up like a hot Christmas toy.  It was the perfect setup and the Democrats and some poor Republicans latched right on as planned.  After forcing the hand (having these Dem.s like Schumer give such a loud public outcry in the name of safety), it would look entirely partisan if they made the same outcry over Halliburton.

You can almost visualize Cheney in a dark room with a spotlight over his head, wringing his hands in pleasure at how this turned out as the media and the public ate it up.  The man is genius.  Using the simplest of psychological tricks to get the media and masses to do his bidding.  Jedi Master indeed.