I've been following the Chuck Hagel nomination farce with only a little bit of interest. Such nominations are, by and large, a time for lots of blowhards to do exactly that and then nothing much happens. Well... It's actually quite interesting. :-)
It's like watching a car crash - you can't help but look.
The blowhards, Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Tom Cruze, er Ted Cruze, are in full-throated carnival barker mode, with the star of the show being the nation of Israel. They're using the fact that Senator Hagel - one of their own, by the way - is anti-Israel because he wants to put some daylight between Israel's belligerent foreign policy and America's. The Republican GOP seems to be in favor of giving the Secretary of Defense job to Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister. (Why would I think Sheldon Adelson is behind a lot of this?)
Senator Hagel didn't give a good accounting of himself during the confirmation hearings; that alone makes me wonder why the heck he was nominated. Admittedly, the questioning was bizarre and trite, but still - he's no Hillary. If the man survives the circus What's likely to happen is an endless series of hearings about how Israel is being shortchanged by some mysterious, and fictional, policy. I don't have any inclination either way on his getting the job; I think the President's second term nominations have been almost universally dreach (John Kerry? Really?) and not especially inspiring. Senator Hagel might know a lot about the problems America faces, but that doesn't make him qualified to run the defense establishment. On the other hand, I'm pretty certain Bibi shouldn't be the SecDef, either.
Carolyn Ann
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Miserable attempts at insult, self-pity and whiny sniveling isn't. There are other blogs that specialize in, and relish, that sort of pedantry.