Posted on 01/08/2013 8:09:51 AM PST by Kaslin
"Never make an enemy by accident," housemaid Anna Bates warned her husband in the third season premiere of "Downton Abbey" Sunday night. That's what the housemaid's mother always told her.
If his mother ever gave him the same advice, former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel -- now President Barack Obama's pick to serve as secretary of defense -- seems to have ignored it.
Biographically, the former U.S. senator from Nebraska and decorated Vietnam War hero makes a great choice. As the president noted, "he'd be the first person of enlisted rank to serve as secretary of defense, one of the few secretaries who have been wounded in war and the first Vietnam veteran to lead the department."
But temperamentally, not so much. Though Obama lauded Hagel for representing "the bipartisan tradition we need more of in Washington," I think that what the president really meant is that Hagel is his favorite kind of Republican, the self-loathing kind.
Make that: the kind whom Democrats like because Republicans do not.
Hagel alienated some on the right when he turned against the Iraq War, for which he had voted in 2002. A lot of people changed their minds about that war, but Hagel went so far as to say in 2007 that "of course" the Iraq War was about oil.
Hagel angered folks from both parties when he said during a 2006 interview, "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here."
The Jewish lobby? Not the Israeli lobby? That's why Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told CNN on Sunday that the Hagel pick was an "in-your-face nomination."
Hagel's opposition to sanctions against Iran led Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, to warn that "nominating a person who is clearly soft on Iran would send exactly the wrong message to Tehran."
The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama in 2012, editorialized that Hagel is the wrong choice because his "stated positions on critical issues, ranging from defense spending to Iran, fall well to the left" of the president's first-term policies.
Some Democrats didn't like the fact that Hagel opposed James Hormel's appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg in 1998 on the grounds that Hormel was "openly, aggressively gay." Last month, Hagel apologized for that remark. The apology did not mollify Barney Frank, an openly gay former member of Congress. Frank called Hagel "aggressively bigoted" last week.
On Monday, as he was angling to be the interim appointee to replace Sen. John Kerry when Kerry becomes secretary of state, Frank dialed back his opposition. It seems that "aggressively bigoted" talk is OK when it comes with someone who infuriates the right. "With the attack coming out of the right, I hope he gets confirmed," Frank told The Boston Globe.
In Obama's world, the most important qualification for secretary of defense might well be: bugging Republicans.
With the "fiscal cliff" fight over, you would think Obama would want to save his fire for the looming battle over the debt ceiling. To the contrary, in picking Hagel, Obama has shown that he prefers to throw lighted matches at the right.
The president has chosen to make more enemies, and it's no accident.
Hussein is all about “in your face”. He’s a petty, vindictive, hateful, thug that hates EVERYTHING this country once represented.
All of this “GOP hates Hagel” bit is to appease Lefties so that they kvetch less about Hagel being on Chevron’s Board of Directors (pro-fracking).
Everything this somebitch does is an “in your face” move. His primary source of cardio excercise is running vicory laps and dancing on graves.
“Republican” Hagel endorsed Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Already our Ted Cruz has said “No” to Hagel, but will he stand alone? If not Hagel, the second choice will just be another Hagel with another name.
Few people realize that America had the highest standard of living in the world beginning about 1750.
The opportunity for material success attracted at least as many people as the opportunity for personal freedom.
That should be enough to vote against him
I see you've been reading Richard Hofstadter. As he noted in America at 1750 (published posthumously),
An Englishman who traveled in America in the opening years of the nineteenth century noticed "many families, particularly in Pennsylvania, of great respectability both in our society and amongst others, who had themselves come over to this country as redemptioners [partial indentees], or were children of such."
What was true of the Pennsylvania interior in the Federal period had been true across the mountains in the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys 40 years earlier.
In the 17th and 18th centuries they mostly came for religious freedom, and to get out from under landlords and squirearchs and other squeezemeisters, and acquire real property of their own.
That's a name I haven't thought about in 40 years.
Never read “1750,” but I did read “The American Political Tradition” for a history class.
I also read “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” after college, but I can't recall a single word of the book.
I read through the Wiki biography.
Seems that Hofstadter started out as a Communist, then became center-left after enjoying considerable success as an author and speaker.
After the student riots at Columbia, he became something of a Neo-Con, which appears to be the time frame in which he wrote “1750.”
Getting a front-row view of Moscow's little chickensh*ts at work fomenting riot and rebellion tends to have that effect on some people. Roger Rosenblatt, longtime talking head on PBS's McNeil-Lehrer Newshour 15 years ago, was a Harvard faculty prof in 1969 when the Communists -- oh, I'm sorry, I meant "progressives" </smoking sarc> -- instigated the student occupation of the admin building there.
The whole idea was to provoke a police riot like Chicago's the year before, which would yield good "information operation" materials </off al-Q'aedaspeak> for the Commie-symp media (remember Rather's joke about CBS, that rumors of a sale couldn't fly because the KGB would never sell?), and radicalize the chumps who'd bitten on the Communists' prolefeed and exposed themselves to police action by digging in and making a show of longterm occupation.
Rosenblatt said he was walking past the back of the building when he saw all these "students" bailing out of the back windows and running away, just as the police, batons rising and falling on the fellow-travelers, waded in the front entrance.
Rosenblatt asked one of the fleeing ratweasels why they were running away and abandoning their followers. One of them replied, "the leadership must always preserve itself" -- a statement right out of the mouth of Orwell's big pig, Napoleon, in Animal Farm.
Not sure what’s more shocking...
Dan Rather telling a self-deprecating joke.
Or, Dan Rather telling a really, really funny self-deprecating joke.
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