Chris Matthews said on Hardball tonight in re the UAE port deal:

"The President looks like a Democrat and Democrats look like security conscious Republicans!"

Matthews repeats the Republican campaign message that Democrats are weak on security and Republicans are strong. Matthews made this statement with no evidence that Democrats are in any way weak on security. Furthermore, he does not mention that the current Republican government has consistently failed to protect the security of Americans.

David Sirota looks at who is really weak on national security

In other words, Americans don't buy the Rove-Hackett storyline [that Democrats are weak on national security]. They get that the defense/intelligence budget has, for years, been increasingly corrupted by bought-off politicians who have used it to enrich their defense industry campaign contributors. You have to look no further than the shenanigans of Reps. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) or Jerry Lewis (R-CA) on the Defense Appropriations Committee to know why Americans see the truth on this. In fact, it was none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who tacitly acknowledged this reality when he recently advocated for military "transformation" - a program that included major defense spending cuts to outdated weapons systems that contractors were getting fat off of, but that weren't targeted to the War on Terror. And throughout the 1980s it was Dick Cheney who pushed repeatedly to cut defense spending, again citing the wastefulness of outdated programs. These two are clearly "weak" on national security because of their decisions to send us into a war that diverted resources from pursuing the perpetrators of 9/11 - but they are not "weak" on national security because of their previous (and now abandoned) efforts to refocus national security spending.

However much Karl Rove and other Republican strategists want to make it conventional wisdom, Democrats are not weak on national security, and Republicans are not strong on national security. Chris Matthews does a disservice to his viewers and to political debate when he unquestioningly repeats partisan campaign messages.

Update: Jane Hamsher has more evidence that Republicans are not strong on security