Free Republic

Hagel, Bruning angling for right BY ROBYNN TYSVER WORLD-HERALD BUREAU LINCOLN - If Jon Bruning and Chuck Hagel tangle in a GOP primary fight next spring, both may have trouble with the right flank of the Nebraska Republican Party. Party loyalty - a virtue prized by staunch Republicans - poses trouble for both. Hagel has angered many Republicans in Nebraska for his unabashed criticism of President Bush and the Iraq war. That anger rose substantially with Hagel's recent comments that impeachment of the president was an "option," even though he quickly clarified that it isn't an option he supports. "I...

Republican (in name only) Senator Chuck Hagel, darling and hero of the leftist media, appeared on 'This Week' yesterday. It was there that he used the "I" word....impeachment. Hagel's all upset about the war and says some see impeachment of the president as an option to stop said war. Of course, Hagel is running for president...and whenever he criticizes George Bush the media considers him the most important, solid, hard-core Republican ever. This is all despite the fact that 99% of Americans outside of Nebraska have never heard of Chuck Hagel and couldn't pick him out of a lineup. The...

But there are no places in Hagel for metaphor. His face is too meaty for poetics, its tectonics shaped by old football injuries and one horrible day in the Mekong Delta when the flesh of it bubbled and burned. His sentences are too often arrhythmic, breaking in the middle, when what he's saying takes an unexpected turn that seems to startle him most of all. "The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can...