Indeed. They are, after all, siding with some rather dubious liberal characters themselves. In today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof (that well known conservative columnist) wrote about how the port deal presents no threat because the UAE is such a swell and upstanding country -- actually stating that the UAE "is the Disneyland of the Arab world."
I think its become a kind of collective hallucination. Yeah sure, Dubai was once chock full of money-laundering, terrorist facilitating scoundrels, but that was a couple of months ago, and everything has changed since then!
I think it's a matter of high profile public figures wanting to prove how open minded and "un-Islamophobic" they are. It's a substitute for judgment, and a poor one at that.