I added this at the bottom of the post below, but Karl Rove’s significant concession (camouflaged in face-saving rhetoric) deserves to stand alone:

President George W. Bush would accept a slight delay in permitting Dubai Ports World to acquire a British company that operates six key U.S. ports, senior White House adviser Karl Rove told Fox News.

When asked if Bush would accept a slight delay in implementing the takeover of P&O, Rove said: “Yes, look, there are some hurdles, regulatory hurdles, that this still needs to go through on the British side as well that are going to be concluded next week.

“There’s no requirement that it close, you know, immediately after that,” he said in an interview with FOX News Talks’ “The Tony Snow Show.”

More details via Reuters at Breitbart.com:

Senior officials from the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security struggled to convince the lawmakers that ports were not at risk, saying they had received extra assurances about security from Dubai Ports World.

Democrats questioned the level of scrutiny for the deal, given that top government leadership was not involved in its approval and that the vetting panel had rejected only one deal among the 1,500 it had reviewed since 1988. Just 25 deals had required a second-level, 45-day review.

“What is deeply troubling to me about this proposed sale is the combination of one of America’s vulnerabilities to terrorist attack, our ports, with what appears to me to be a casual approach to reviewing the sale of U.S. port facilities to a country with an uneven record of combating terrorism,” Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said.

Levin and New York Democrat Hillary Clinton said the administration skipped what should have been a required 45-day review of the deal under the law. But the officials insisted all security concerns were addressed in the initial review.

Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee who called the briefing, said he also had pointed out failings to the administration.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, which oversees the interagency panel that approved the ports contract, was scathing about it on Thursday. The process had “failed miserably,” Alabama’s Sen. Richard Shelby said.

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