Hagel was appalled. “These are people with no courage, on both sides,” he says. “Cowards. Nameless and faceless. I called it the filthiest thing I’d ever seen.”

Both sides, Chuck?

Yeah, that ‘both sides’ comment made me wince. Props (as the kids say) for his actions re: Chambliss’ horrific behavior. Well, Chambliss among others, that is.

And one other thing before the lunch bell rings in period 5: If Pierce is not part of one’s daily reading, one should ask themselves why they are not doing so. One will then realize there is no good answer to that question.

He’s a Republican. He’s always been a mouthpiece for movement conservatives. He does NOT belong in Obama’s cabinet, despite the currently trendy enemy-of-my-enemy justifications. He’s a combat vet with a functioning brain, so he sees war for what it is – what, Obama couldn’t find a qualified Democrat who knows going to war for the fucking hell of it is both a moral AND a functional disaster.

How is it at the very moment that American politics became more ideologically polarized than ever before Barack Obama decided to be “post-partisan”?

How? That must be sarcasm, no?

I misread the title. Thought it said “pieces of Hagel.”

But it’s a morning in May…

Lemme think about this. On the one hand, we have

“the young cheerleaders of this war, the chickenhawks at places like The Weekly Standard…think-tank cowboys and talk-show Napoleons,”

while on the other hand, we have a guy who picked up two Purple Hearts for on-the-ground military service during the Vietnam war.

Um…I dunno. That’s a tough call.

“He’s out of patience with the young cheerleaders of this war, the chickenhawks at places like The Weekly Standard”

Then again he’s all for the Chickenhawk-In-Chief at the White House

Let’s go to the video……

Because maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a Sec of Defense who actually cares more about the people who fight the wars than the policies that drive us to war. Jesus, even Greenwald is defending Hagel.

We would have marriage equality by now if it wasn’t for people like Obama who overlook hatred against gay people in exchange for some other goal.

We would also permit gay Americans to serve in the military if it weren’t for Barack Obam — oh, wait.

Seriously, that was one dumb comment.

The implication, however, after Gates and Panetta, is that there are no Democrats in DC who can be trusted to run the Pentagon. That the BEST we can do is find a Republican with non-insane foreign policy opinions. Even if he’s a good short-run choice, it just creates a bigger long-term problem.

I’m pretty sure he could have found equivalent experience and ideology in a Democrat without the domestic policy baggage and terrible party optics. It’s not like he’s avoiding a confirmation fight with Hagel…

From Common Dreams;

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company’s computer-controlled voting machines showed he’d won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel’s “Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election.” According to Bev Harris of http://www.blackboxvoting.org, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel “was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska.”

What Hagel’s website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

“This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was,” said Hagel’s Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka (www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). “They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn’t shock me.”

Hagel is widely considered ‘the’ poster boy for wholesale electronic election fraud, but hey, John McCain don’t like him, so he’s our guy!

Of course, McCain is opposing Hagel now because McCain is a bitter old fraud and an asshole.

I usually agree with you. But, I don’t think, McCain is a fraud. I think he is exactly what he appears to be, a bitter, old asshole.

So, now Hagel is the good guy since he’s joining TeamBlue’s ass-kicking Empire squad? That’s pretty lame analysis, TBogg.

Wouldn’t it probably be the best thing that ever happened to the people who fight the wars if we actually had someone in office who cared very deeply about the policies which drive us to war?

Well, it’s possible that Sec Defense needs to be first an excellent administrator. That means deconstructing a rubicks cube without dropping any of the 27 (or 64) the pieces on the floor. Sec Def’s function is not to make ideological policy or decisions — just my theory as a retired vet.

There would not necessarily be a party affiliation prohibition in that regard. There could be, but not necessarily so.

I’d give O the benefit of the doubt in this. Yet I agree with you, mikeyhemlock, in that Hagel has said and done some things which are out of school and which I don’t like at all.

The reason I give O the benefit of the doubt this time is simply the likelihood there will be a new, accelerated round of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process on the platter. Maybe O feels Hagel has the best credentials to engage BRAC. I don’t know. It’s just my hunch.

Outside of the fact that I like Hagel because of his protective attitude towards American soldiers amd not throwing them into a war because the neocons think it would be cool beans, I also like the fact that Obama has once again baited Republicans into turning on one of their own.

That’s just a bonus.

It appears that Obama couldn’t find a weak-kneed Liberal to lead the War Department so Hagel will now direct the Forever War.

I know i feel safer already, Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran.

The problem is we have too many people who are so caught up in the policies that they disregard the people (boots on the ground) who pay the ultimate price. It would be nice to have someone who actually served (Hagel has acknowledged how he was used in Vietnam) who can step up and say “I’m not going to send a bunch of people out to die” without being called a coward.

So obviously you haven’t paid enough attention to know that one of the complaints about Hagel is that he is not tough enough on Iran.

But, please, you were saying….?

Here you go, from Charles Pierce: Warmonger.

I’ll take a stab at your question, though of necessity it will be speculative, since I ain’t no mind-reader.

I think the Kenyan Usurper really wants to cut the defense budget, but even after a short time in the U.S. Senate after his January 2005 arrival there, I’m sure he became aware of just how sacrosanct the DoD budget is to so many – Military-Industrial-Complex and all that.*

Obummer has already demolished the ‘Dems are wimps’ meme, by showing what a bad-ass killin’ machine he can run. I’m guessing he wants to keep that meme beaten down, in fact needs to, in order to muster all the credibility he can to overwhelm the combined forces of neocons, defense industry power brokers, and their Villager surrogates. It would be quite hard to do that by bringing in a socialist, capitulatin’, bleeding heart libtard Dem as the SoD nominee, since the resulting “optics”, if you will, would be used against White House efforts to cut the DoD budget, which is going to be a right bastard to pull off under even the best of circumstances.

There are of course some neocon Dems – e.g., Michele Flournoy is one name often proposed – but neocons have never supported DoD budget cuts. Bomb, baybee, bomb, and damn the expense! is how they roll.

Hagel, or some other conservative Republican who isn’t a wackaloon neocon, is – again, just spitballing here – the best way to neutralize a significant amount of the expected opposition to putting the DoD on a diet. I think is is somewhat analogous to the Nixon-goes-to-China thing, for those of us old enough to remember that. Someone perceived to be from the Left will simply have a much harder time with this already difficult task.

*IMHO, should be called the MICC, the extra ‘C’ for ‘Congressional’. My pet name for it is Eisenhower’s Dragon; that seems much more adorable. It’s a Dragon MADE OF PEOPLE, you know!

ETA: In other words, what maa8722 @18 said!

What you said. Absolutely correct.

Hagel also brings business experience and, as an on the ground kind of guy, he is not likely to be sympathetic to the Perks of Being A General/Admiral when it comes to cutting things at Defense.

Acts like a Republican. Walks like a Republican. Talks like a Republican. Must BE a Republican.

And I’m not talking about Hagel.

Just to add to the mix….I think he’s really cute. So, does that get a vote? Otherwise looks like a verrry heated stand-off. I’ll just stand by this man….

Perhaps, TBogg, a lot of the resistance to Hagel is because he was an ENLISTED man in the Vietnam War. A class issue, perhaps? What do you think? I’m just throwing that out there.

Hagel is not a liberal. But then that’s not what we need him for. If you read the Pierce article and watched the first and last video, you come away with the feeling of a man who cares and does not carry anyone else’s water. He was a foot soldier, what you can call a grunt. It is past time someone had their interests at heart as we plan the next campaign. Who knows, maybe he will help bring this farce in AFPak to an end.

Thanks for clarifying. I was looking at it more as whether a war policy made any sense at all, not just for sending soldiers to be killed, but all the other kinds of bad outcomes we’ve seen in our wars, but yours seems like a fair point on the plus side if you think he’d really draw some lines.

There is one dem who is eminently qualified; Wes Clark.

First in his class at West Point
Rhodes scholar (Economics and Poly Sci)
Silver Star and Purple Heart during Vietnam service
Wrote the “Powell Doctrine” before it was the the “Powell Doctrine”.
Worked in the Office of Management and Budget
Was on the staff of the Chiefs of Staff
Was the military advisor to a diplomatic negotiating team headed by assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke which brought about the Dayton Peace accords (ended the war in Bosnia).
Supreme Allied Commander Europe which carries the same weight as being a head of state.
Won the Kosovo war.
Drummed out of the Army by jealous fuckwits (Sec Def William Cohen [R] among others). When Clinton found out he was not pleased.
Was against the Iraq war from the start.
Was for repeal of DADT during his presidential bid.
Believes there should be a Dept of Peace
Heavily involved in Green energy issues

Smartest guy in the room, although why he hosted that stupid reality show is beyond me.

On the troops. From the intro to his book “A time to lead”:

“Get that gun going!” I shouted again, as I looked back under my left arm and saw the troops come across the little footbridge. They were there. And they came running. Those peace-symbol-lovin’, foul-mouthed, cussin’, war-hatin’ draftee American soldiers came, right into the the firefight. They rushed into the smack of the bullets, and the whine of the ricochets. They were called forward and they came! God, I loved them.

Also too

“For after all, the greatest way to honor our men and women in uniform is to require their sacrifice the least.”

He is a good guy. Seems he too would be a good choice. But if you want a grunt, a four star won’t help.

Hey mikeyhemlok ,you really take this tribal partisanship seriously,eh ? First there is Hagel who is so naive he doesn’t realize that the Israeli Right determines when we go to war ,as was evidenced with Judaeo-Christian Zionists whose neocon agenda pushed the Iraq war on us ,and whom we now see demanding fealty from their US political stooges pursuant to fighting another war for them in Iran .And out of this treasonous quagmire of corrupt self-interests.you find moral outrage in the immoral bowels of a kleptocratic machination between the two republican parties .I think that is just precious ,and you should be proud of taking such a riveting stance .

He was a grunt in VN before he was a four star (infantry Captain).

I’ll take a Nam draftee as Defence Secretary over ANY SINGLE OTHER PERSON (Other than Harry Truman, who had the misfortune to be an officer.)

GWPDA
Some of us enlisted to try and beat the draft and great a better slot. Didn’t work out so well for a lot of us, myself included. That and we believed the recruiters.

From Mr. Pierce’s 2007 piece:

His [Hagel's] face has darkened and his eyes seem to have turned to stone. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has come before the Foreign Relations Committee of a radically different Senate to try and explain, among other things, how sending twenty-one thousand additional United States troops into a meat grinder of a ground war is somehow not an escalation of the conflict. She keeps calling it an “augmentation.” She crawfishes on the subject of what will happen if the new strategy somehow sends American troops across the Iranian border. Chuck Hagel is having none of this.

“Some of us,” Hagel says, “remember 1970, Madam Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said, We didn’t cross the border into Cambodia. In fact, we did. I happen to know something about that.

“I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam — if it’s carried out.

“I will resist it.”

Rice sits there like an ice sculpture. The committee room erupts in applause.

I will resist it.

And as Pierce notes later,

Here’s another thing about that committee. A whole clutch of them are now — or have considered — running for president in 2008. [Then-chairman Joe] Biden’s in, and so are Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd. Feingold thought about it and, after contemplating how well a twice-divorced Jewish person from Wisconsin would play south of Kenosha, abandoned the idea. And then there’s Chuck Hagel, who isn’t even sure at this moment whether he’ll run for reelection to the Senate but who, in his own dogged, deliberately anticharismatic way, has found a cause with an audience.

I wonder what Obama and Biden think of this speech now. I’m sure there’s part of them that love the idea of a Republican telling his own president to cut the crap. I wonder, though, if they’ve considered that Hagel may do the same with them, if/when he becomes Secretary of Defense.

For example, over the growing — and unaccountable — use of drones.

If the Republicans threaten to shoot down Hagel, Obama should then threaten to nominate Max Cleland.

That would shut them up right quick.

One of my longtime liberal blogging friends, one who wants the GOP to just implode and get it over with already, fears Chuck Hagel as he fears no other Republican. And it’s for precisely the things you cite from Pierce’s piece.

Chuck Hagel, conservative as he is, is still a lot closer to what John McCain claimed to be than Reverse Ace ever was. And it’s that sort of image — image with more than a little seasoning from reality — that would win presidential elections, if the GOP chose to finally ignore the crazy base whose bigotry-based craziness they’ve so carefully cultivated for so long.

Does Obama have a history with Clark or does he just like Hagel better? Hagel seems to have pretty good creds.

That actually makes sense, as a lot of Hagel’s age peers – such as, say, Saxby Chambliss — didn’t serve because they were too rich or well-connected.

Someone like Hagel, who came from a decidedly lower-middle-class background and who actually enlisted, probably makes most of the chickenhawks on all sides of the aisle (see here his famed disemboweling of Joe Lieberman) cringe with whatever discomfort their consciences are still capable of mustering.

An oldie(in today’s time-compressed sense) but a goodie. Thanks for that link. I’ll say one thing for Hagel, no matter how much I may disagree with him on a veritable plethora of issues, he’s sane.

No wonder the Zionists hate him.

he’s sane.

From what we know.

Since when does the SecDef make policy? I thought you were the wise one here on how our Gov works.

Hagel will carry out the orders given him by his commander or he wouldn’t take the job.

He may be a better person than some of the whackos out there but it took him three years to realize the Irak war was a mistake, a little slow in my opinion.

Thank you for that reminder.

I knew there was something I was forgetting about Hagel in all the recent Israel and gay rights noise.

He’s a vote-stealer, pure and simple.

Just because he’s a secretary of defense doesn’t make him an actual secretary. I’m going to assume that Obama wouldn’t appoint him if he wasn’t going to use him for advice just like he does with Biden. In fact, Biden and Hagel are very good friends.

Hagel will carry out the orders given him by his commander or he wouldn’t take the job.

Based upon what I’ve seen of Hagel, he’d probably quit and make a stink about it. He has nothing to lose by doing that and and everything to gain.

I’m pleased to see the nomination. My recollection of Hagel involves his opposition to the Iraq War and questioning the obvious lies put out by the Bush Administration, at a time when public opinion was still listening to the Gary Owen and calling anyone who had any question a traitor or an appeaser. He was one of the few people, even including Democrats and the press, who had the guts to endanger his own position and future, based on opposition to a still popular war. Compare that to the Republicans in the current congress who will gamble with the economic future of the country and the world, rather than be primaried.

Also, I agree with the previous comments concerning the fact that the Defense Department is in for rather large downsizing and that is likely to go slightly smoother with a Republican in front. Additionally, I agree with the previous comments regarding Wesley Clark’s suitability (I donated to him when he campaigned for president), and Wesley Clark gave very strong arguments endorsing Hagel. Finally, I recollect that throughout WWII, in the most liberal Democratic Administration in history and when the Democrats were accused of being the “war party”, Roosevelt relied on Republican Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War and Republican Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy. Neither stole any glory from the Democratic Party.

The Liberal Sparkle Ponies and revisionist historians are dancing on the graves of all the silent dead from our recent wars.

Chuck Hagel may have questioned the jingoism displayed by many before the Iraq war but he never actually opposed the war and voted for it. Anyone who thinks he is some kind of peacenick or opposes the policies he helped craft with Obama is a fool.

The Liberal kowtowing to Authoritarian, gun carrying, Conservatives on matters of security is telling, even they don’t trust other Liberals with the tough manly jobs, just the soft safe administrative positions.

So conspiracy theories about Obama winning the 2008 primaries through massive vote and caucus fraud are just that but conspiracy theories about Chuck Hagel “I AM OWN ALL UR VOTE MACHINES!” are simply the truth? Got it.