It seems one can’t read a news article about the deal to allow a Dubai-owned company to operate ports in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Baltimore, Miami and New Orleans without coming across a mention of the “bipartisan opposition.” It’s true – one of the more amusing aspects of this whole storm over ports is seeing Senator Schumer, a partisan Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, canoodling with Senator Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma. Viewers of the Alito and Roberts confirmation hearings may recall how Mr. Schumer’s withering assaults on the Republican nominees contrasted with Dr. Coburn’s acid references to abortion rights as “this wonderful right to choose to kill their unborn babies.”

Less noticed is the fact that the support for the Dubai ports deal is also bipartisan. How many other issues are there on which President Carter agrees with President Bush (and, it looks like, President Clinton), while The New York Sun, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal agree with The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman? We wouldn’t go so far as to agree with Mr. Friedman’s suggestion that the security argument is “borderline racist” but we do agree with his suggestion that much of it is “bogus.”

Also favoring the deal are the notorious right-winger Nicholas Kristof and and the notorious left-winger Bill O’Reilly. Not to mention the president of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby. The man who personifies bipartisanship, Senator McCain, issued a statement saying, “The President’s leadership has earned our trust in the war on terror, and surely his administration deserves the presumption that they would not sell our security short. Dubai has cooperated with us in the war and deserves to be treated respectfully.”

So amid all the caterwauling about how divided and polarized America has become, it’s a small point worth mentioning that the Dubai port issue doesn’t break along the usual partisan lines or the usual hawk-dove lines. Senator Schumer no doubt finds it a little worrisome to be on the same side of an issue as Senator Coburn, and we find it a little worrisome to be on the same side of an issue as James Zogby and President Carter. But it’s probably healthy in some sense for the divisions in our body politic to have some permeability to them.