The battle between Chris Hohn's TCI and CSX Corp. will be reaching a head soon during CSX's annual meeting. Even CNN's Lou Dobbs is getting into the act with his populist bent, siding with classic railroad Americana to stave off a foreign invasion of sorts by Hohn and Co. CSX brought Hohn out of hiding in this whole fight, and the final countdown has begun.

Lou Dobbs, wearing an American flag pin in his left lapel, introduced a segment on his CNN program last week with his trademark outrage. “Tonight, there is a new threat to national sovereignty and security: A foreign hedge fund trying to take control of CSX.”

Doing his best imitation of Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell” line — but with no sense of irony — Mr. Dobbs said of the foreign hedge fund, “Who the heck do they think they are?” At one point he proclaimed, “This has to go immediately to C.F.I.U.S.,” a reference to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as he contended CSX “is without question a national security asset.”

Mr. Dobbs, a vocal opponent of Dubai’s attempt to buy six American ports, is not the only one up in arms. Six members of the Senate Banking Committee are raising red flags too.

CSX is, of course, one of the largest railroad companies in the nation. And given all the hubbub, you’d imagine the hedge fund was based in the Middle East. But the hedge fund is — wait for it — based in London. Yes, London. The British are coming!

And exactly which “shadowy investment group” — that’s how Mr. Dobbs’s broadcast described it — is the target of his ire?

The Children’s Investment Fund Management, a hedge fund started by Christopher Hohn, a British money manager, that donates a portion of the fees it generates to charities like the International Rescue Committee and many H.I.V.- and AIDS-related projects. That’s not to say the fund, known as TCI, is warm and cuddly: it takes activist roles and is sometimes a bit rough around the edges. Some critics even contend that the whole charity thing is a self-serving marketing gimmick to help soften its image. But one thing TCI is not: a national security threat. And yet somehow — well, it’s not a mystery, and we’ll get to that in a moment — CSX has managed to turn a proxy contest for 5 of 12 board seats (it is hardly a takeover, at least not yet) into a debate about national security. The six senators wrote a letter to the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., last week suggesting, absurdly, that TCI is “anonymous and invisible to government regulators.”

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