Posted on 02/15/2013 11:01:00 AM PST by Kaslin
Chuck Hagel's nomination to be secretary of defense is in trouble -- as it should be. The former Republican senator has so much baggage it is amazing that the administration hasn't dumped him, as they did Susan Rice when her proposed nomination ran into trouble. Unfortunately, having won that battle, the GOP may be in weaker position to defeat another Obama nominee. And Rice, her misstatements about the attack on Benghazi notwithstanding, would have been a less dangerous cabinet member than Hagel.
Hagel has made clearly anti-Semitic statements before public forums time and again. If his target had been, say, blacks or Hispanics, he'd have been forced to withdraw. Just try it on for size.
What if Hagel had been on record as declaring, "The black [or Latino] lobby intimidates a lot of people"? And then had publicly declared the Ku Klux Klan "legitimate"? What if the nominee had also been the one U.S. senator who refused to sign a letter criticizing the former apartheid government of South Africa for its racist treatment of blacks?
In fact, Hagel's actions with respect to Jews have followed exactly this course. In 2006, Hagel said, "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people," an accusation for which he could not produce a single example during his confirmation hearings. He has defended the murderous Iranian regime as "legitimate" -- a regime whose leaders are committed to annihilating Israel and who deny the Holocaust. And he's opposed sanctions against Iran, even though the regime is a state sponsor of terrorism against the United States. Apparently he thinks Israel is a greater threat to the U.S. than Iran. In a speech at Rutgers University, Hegel accused the U.S. state department of taking its orders from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Lest anyone think his animus is towards Israel -- not Jews -- consider that he is the only U.S. senator to have refused to sign a letter to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin asking him to take action against rising anti-Semitism in Russia. Hagel's office issue the lame excuse that the then senator had a "policy not to send letters to foreign heads of state regarding their domestic policy." Really? Well then I guess we can expect President Obama's nominee to remain silent on Syrian and North Korean "domestic policy" as these nations slaughter their citizens by gunning the down in the streets of Homs or Aleppo or killing them slowly in the gulags of Hoeryong?
Hagel would do himself and the president a big favor by stepping aside. His performance during his confirmation hearings was embarrassing. He seemed woefully ignorant of the president's own policies toward a nuclear Iran. At one point, he said "I support the president's strong position on containment," suggesting the president believes a nuclear-armed Iran can be "contained" much as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. But President Obama has not suggested he favors containment, which would be a green light to the Iranians to move ahead with their plans to develop nuclear weapons. So Hagel later tried to correct the record, but in doing so he made himself look like a fool. In fact his inability to answer questions before the Senate committee alone should be enough to derail his nomination.
The president has a right to nominate his cabinet -- but the Constitution doesn't give him a blank check. The Senate also plays an important role in advising and consenting on presidential appointments. President Obama may have thought he was extending an olive branch to Republicans by picking a former GOP elected official for his defense secretary. But Hagel is a caricature of the Republican Party -- a man whose personal prejudices (his anti-gay comments about a Clinton nominee seem to have been largely forgotten by his liberal backers) are cringe-inducing and who is as ill-informed as he is inarticulate.
The Senate will take up Hagel's nomination next week after Thursday's threatened filibuster delayed the vote. That is unless the president admits his mistake and pulls the nomination. The country would be better served if he did.
You would think with all the Jews in Obamas cabinet, one would have resigned over this.
But Obama says he’s been awarded two Purple Stars!
Obama REALLY wants a guy like Hagel - a Republican and one who has enough skeletons in his closet he’ll do whatever he’s told - to gut the military.
The Israel lobby is powerful. Pretending otherwise makes us look stupid. You want evidence of its influence, check the Republican platform. Notice how McCain folds to give Dems the pot on basically any other issue but this one. What am I doing, anyway? This isn’t a real argument. We all know what’s happening.
Is it all because he said the word “Jewish”? If so, that means Pubs have turned into Jesse Jackson. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and it sickens me when our side plays the race fare. Babels Jews are not the”Joos” of conspiracy website comment section. Guess what, Israel is a Jewish country. And not the way people say the US was founded on judeo-christian values. They are the real deal. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling the Israeli lobby the Jewish lobby.
This is all about neoconservatism. We have an empire now in the Middle East, and to some our borders and Israel’s are equivalent. Hagel must go down because he’s a Republican and off the reservation.
The culture warriors need to rid the culture of these entrenched hypocrites by marginalizing them.
The culture warriors need to rid the culture of these entrenched hypocrites by marginalizing them.
People keep saying that, but the defense secretary can’t do that. Congress has to start the ball rolling, and it will redound upon the president no matter who is at the Pentagon. Besides, Obama has been basically a carbon copy of Bush the Younger. Except he extended war to Libya and probably Syria covertly, and started assassinating enemies instead of merely indefinitely detaining and torturing them. When will you drop the whole Democrats want to gut the military and surrender nonsense.
JINOs
Rice and Hagel are both unacceptable, so it's poor reasoning to allow one to go through so you can have more firepower to stop the other. Besides, boldness is not a zero-sum game. Would the GOPe be fighting Hagel as firmly as they are had they not gotten Rice out of the way? I think not. If they'd have caved on Rice, Hagel would already be sworn in.
Much has been made of Hagel’s anti-Semitic comments, his refusal to back the war in Iraq and his financial disclosures (or lack thereof).
I think what is really killing Hagel’s nomination is that he is such an insufferable back-stabbing ass that even many of his old colleagues (especially on the GOP side) can’t stand him and don’t trust him.
Hagel wants to be SOD because there are some former superiors from his Army days that he wants to laugh at and say Na-na-na-na-na.
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