Does anyone else have a difficult time understanding this Schumer speak. LOL... is this really what some believe is disputing racism....????? What's a skinhead???
A member of any of various groups of people, especially young people, who shave their heads and sometimes participate in white-supremacist and anti-immigrant activities.
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The Senator’s position came under fire from many quarters, with some critics suggesting that opposition to the deal was driven by xenophobia or anti-Arab racism. Mr. Schumer heatedly disputes that view.
“Let’s say skinheads had bought a company to take over our port,” he said. “I think the outcry would have been the same.”
Dubai or Not Dubai:
Chuck On Killed Deal
By Ben Smith
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Even by Chuck Schumer standards, there were a lot of cameras set up outside the Farley Post Office in midtown, where he and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer were expected to denounce illegally mailed cigarettes. As Mr. Spitzer and the press pack waited for the Senator to arrive, Mr. Schumer’s press secretary, Risa Heller, fielded a steady stream of requests from the networks. “Everybody’s going to want to do a one-on-one,” an NBC producer told her. “I want you to have a one-on-one; he wants you to have a one-on-one,” Ms. Heller assured a producer from Fox News.
“Next thing, he’s going to force President Bush to sign an executive order banning A.T.M. fees,” one member of the crowd joked.
The joke was that what had begun, inauspiciously, at a slushy, ill-attended, classic Chuck Schumer press conference one month earlier had turned into President Bush’s most serious political defeat. New York’s senior Senator was the first politician to criticize the sale of the operator of several American ports to a company owned by the government of Dubai. Just over a week later, Mr. Schumer and his unlikely allies in conservative talk radio had stampeded the Republican Congressional leadership into open opposition to the President.
“It was utterly amazing—who would believe it?” Mr. Schumer said as the deal appeared in its death throes by mid-March. “I did always think, if it achieved a certain level of visibility, that we could stop it. I thought it would be maybe at the jet-plane level, and it ended up being an intergalactic missile.”
Mr. Schumer’s campaign against the Dubai deal was a Sunday press conference gone nuclear, a political explosion fueled by the tabloid-honed, bread-and-butter Brooklyn populism that has driven Mr. Schumer’s remarkable success with the New York and, increasingly, the national media. The ingredients were familiar: a suspicion of Arab governments; an immediate grasp of an issue’s visceral appeal (Terrorists! Ports!); and a wonky intimacy with the arcana of a relatively obscure policy area, maritime security.
The Senator’s position came under fire from many quarters, with some critics suggesting that opposition to the deal was driven by xenophobia or anti-Arab racism. Mr. Schumer heatedly disputes that view.
“Let’s say skinheads had bought a company to take over our port,” he said. “I think the outcry would have been the same.”
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observer.com |
