I work for an academic journal that is printed in Hong Kong. Last summer, our journals were shipped in a container that got stopped at customs for scanning, and it delayed distribution by a full month. Unless they truly have some way to scan containers very, very quickly (like the way they had to quickly bring Iraq back to stability), inspecting every single container is going to bring international trade to a complete standstill.

I'm a big liberal, but that doesn't make me blind. Democrats are so political they wouldn't know what to think if there weren't a Republican Party. The Republicans determine the national themes; the Democrats accept those themes as though they were handed down from God; the Democrats then make a million tiny political decisions in an effort to make the Republicans look ever-so-slightly worse. But today's Democrats sure as hell don't base anything on conviction or what's best for the nation (though occasionally the public gets lucky with them).

How in the hell are you going to check everything at our ports? Do you realize what kind of work that would entail? Moreover, if you did waste however many hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to do that (including lost revenue from delays), someone hell bent on causing us harm would just find an alternative path.

What is most annoying about the protect-every-port crowd is that they frame Republicans as hypocrites on national security by hypocritically playing the fear card themselves - the card that Republicans used to ride into power! How pathetic that they can't even think up their own priorities that Republicans ignore.

Instead of checking every box that enters the nation, I think it's about time we tried being less of an international dick. Maybe then so many people wouldn't hate us (it's not like Sweden is under attack - and there's a lot of freedom to hate there). Of course no Democrat is willing to admit that the US has been a major asshole for the last 50 years, so they're left with blaming the Republicans for not being Republican enough.

I guess if your concern is all about "Blue Team" and "Red Team," it doesn't matter how you win. But if you care about peace and justice, your team isn't even on the field.