Foreign country or company: What's the difference?

Apparently Fox News’ Neil Cavuto has a hard time distinguishing between the two in his coverage of the Dubai company that wanted to take over control of six ports here in the United States.

Fox Hounds reports, “For somebody in charge of a business show, Neil Cavuto has a tough time understanding the difference between a foreign company and a foreign country. Moments after Dubai Ports World announced on Thursday (March 9, 2006) that it was selling its interests in the operation of six American ports to a U.S. company, Cavuto was still trying to trap people with that phony ‘country profiling’ concern of his.

“On ‘Your World with Neil Cavuto,’ Cavuto asked Sen. Bob Menendez, D-New Jersey, why Democrats who opposed the DPW deal were not guilty of ‘country profiling’ against the United Arab Emirates since they never objected to the operation of the ports by a British company, P & O.

‘No foreign government, not simply the government of Dubai, should have the ownership and control’ of an American port, said Menendez, who has introduced legislation to bar such ownership. ‘When it comes to the ports of our country, because of the tremendous security risks that they present to us, [I think] that ultimately we will not have them under the operational capacity or ownership of a foreign government,’ he said.

“Is it possible that Cavuto never understood that DPW was owned by the UAE, while P & O was not owned by the government of Great Britain? It seems like an important distinction, that a sovereign nation would not give up control of its points of entry to another sovereign nation. Cavuto apparently never got it or he stuck stubbornly to the Bush talking points until the bitter end.”

Read the posting here.