I used to dislike John McCain, but now I pretty much hate the guy. He filibusters Chuck Hagel, calls him unqualified, says he’s the most unimpressive nominee in all of recorded history, and then says he’s still a friend. Well, friendship is a two-way street. It’s clear that McCain doesn’t understand how friendship works.
I also don’t believe that he filibustered his “friend” for the giggles. He says that Hagel will be confirmed and that he will drop his support for the filibuster when the Senate reconvenes. That may be, but McCain is still trying to destroy Hagel in the meantime.
And Bob Woodward is trying to help him.
Well, Woodward seems to have active dislike for the President so unless he’s naming names he’s just a lying bastard. Why in the world would Democrats want Hagel to withdraw when it’s pretty clear he’s going to be confirmed?
As for McCain it’s all about revenge as usual.
“democrats in disarray?”
Bob really is a one trick pony
That man is a nasty piece of work—who conceived Palin!
The man has shown brief (lightning quick) flashes of rationality (remember him arguing with the woman Teabagger that Obama WASN’T an A-rab!)over the years, now almost completely buried in teh crazy. Is he actually that irrational? Has he become more crazy over the last decade? Or is it just pandering to the base? (After all, we ARE talking AZ here.)
With friends like him, you wouldn’t need enemies.
Hanoi Hilton PTSD and a huge sense of familial entitlement.
McCain’s still angry because in 2007 Hagel said invading Iraq was a mistake and McCain can never admit that. Meanwhile, I see that there have been 4.5 million new orphans created there since 2003. And now that the Americans are gone the Shia and Sunni can freely blow up each other’s places of worship while the Kurds stir disruption in Turkey and Syria (greater Kurdistan).
Hey, no problems. We liberated them.
And he’s so transparently thrilled and flattered when called feisty and rambunctious – thinks he’s being complimented.
He’s a tantrum-throwing child with more power than a child should have.
Other than the words “Barack Obama,” why do you even care about what happens to Hagel? The guy’s a reactionary isolationist, who voted for the Iraq war, and (unlike Mitt Romney) was an actual “severely conservative” dipshit in the senate for twelve years.
If not for the president’s prestige, how many senate Democrats would vote for him? 75% of the caucus? 80%?
I don’t care.
You appear to have blogged about the Hagel confirmation and the specific senators blocking it and/or polluting the hearings a total of eight times…in the last week alone.
So other than the daily words on the topic, you totally don’t care. Hmm.
I’m not goo-goo enough to have an ethical objection to senators abusing their power and public responsibility to put the screws to right-wing nominees I don’t respect. Let Hagel twist in the wind for a while. They all deserve each other.
I care about how the Republicans behave…nihilistically destroying the traditions and mores of our government, tearing down our safety net, waging needless war, and attacking reason with fury.
Whether or not Hagel is confirmed or not only interests me as it pertains to those other issues.
If he is rejected, I will laugh at him and hope for someone with more wattage in their brain.
I’ve got to say, your apathy for Hagel per se mystifies me. It’s as if the president picked him out at random.
Hagel meant nothing to me at the start, and I agree he did not do well in the hearings. But I’ve developed some genuine respect for the guy as I learned more about him.
He is a decorated war hero and anything but a militarist. He was an enlisted man from a lower middle-class background. He went to college on GI benefits and hasn’t forgotten what that means; he is strongly supported by veterans’ organizations. He is a republican hated and slandered by the most hateful republicans. He must be doing something right.
You know what my problem is? I’m a snob. I don’t think a stupid fuck should be in charge of the Pentagon.
What’s ironic is that one of my main criticisms of Obama’s staffing decisions has been his heavy reliance on people who are at the very top of the educational food chain. Sometimes it seemed like you couldn’t land a job with the administration unless you had an Ivy League degree or went to Stanford or MIT. I think there are a lot of capable people who went to lesser schools.
But I still want incredibly bright people running our government, and Hagel just isn’t a smart man. If you want to call him smart for a conservative Republican, I’ll grant you that. He’s thoughtful. He doesn’t decide what he thinks by what he supposed to think.
But he has purely average intelligence. And that is not good enough for me.
I stand up for the little guy, including those who just aren’t that bright, but that doesn’t translate to Chuck Hagel being the next James Forrestal.
Sorry, I am a snob.
If I were convinced that Hagel isn’t intelligent, I might agree with you. Not out of snobbism, but because of course I think people in positions like that need to be intelligent. Hagel does not exactly have a way with words, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not intelligent.
I also believe someone in that position needs to have a strong sense of ethics along with being smart.
From everything I hear, Ted Cruz is extremely smart.
Right. Being smart is a prerequisite, but not the only one.
And if you aren’t that smart, it’s all the more important that you at least share my values.
That’s an interesting thing you just said there, maybe it’s even the key to it. I don’t expect people to share many of my personal values. I wish they did, and I’m very happy if they do, but in my life I’ve seen little evidence of it. Especially a cabinet appointee.
But since it came up, let’s take the Iraq resolution for an example. Personally, I think people who voted for it were either evil, stupid, cowardly, or just political realists. I was so upset with what was going on there that I was telling everyone to write in support of Ron Paul, not because I have any interest in his whole shtick, but he was actually trying to stop the train wreck, one of literally a handful of people in congress actively speaking up against going to war with Iraq. Kucinich too.
What are you supposed to do? A lot of those people are, in most other circumstances, the best we’ve got.
If I were a purist I couldn’t function.
So, my criterion is not that somebody shares my values, but that somebody isn’t fundamentally AGAINST my most important values. Now, there are plenty of people, I would say the vast majority of Republicans in Congress today, who definitely meet that criterion, and they can go fuck themselves. And if you find that Hagel is fundamentally opposed to your core values, rather than that he just doesn’t get every check box checked on the shibboleth test — I respect that. It’s just that I don’t feel that way.
And finally, I would’t call you an O-bot any more than I’d call myself one. But you do tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, as do I. You yourself said he tends to appoint super-smart people. Obama is certainly no fool. Tell me then, why does he want Hagel as Secretary of Defense? I mean that as a serious question.
Wall Street bankers are incredibly bright–and yet they are capable of massive destruction.
To riff off Gump. Smart is as smart does. Smart people do notoriously stupid things–also greedy things.
Answering stupid questions well is not a great test for intelligence.
If Hagle had been an isolationist, he wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq war. Ron Paul is an actual isolationist and, true to form, he actively opposed the Iraq war.
Anyway, if I have to write off every senator that voted for the Iraq war, there wouldn’t be too many left.
“Anyway, if I have to write off every senator that voted for the Iraq war, there wouldn’t be too many left.”
We would have to write off our current Sec. of State, former Sec. of State, and our VP.
I forgot to finish the thought. Only one Republican senator votes against the Iraq resolution, and that was Sen. Chafee. 29 democratic senators voted for it.
So as I was saying, the interesting thing about Hagel is not that he voted FOR the Iraq war, it’s that he later turned AGAINST it. And that’s exactly why McCain hates him.
“McCain, an ardent supporter of the Iraq War from the start, began his questioning of Hagel by asking about the latter’s past statements regarding the so-called “surge” of forces into Iraq in 2007. Hagel, by then a vocal critic of the war, came out strongly against adding additional troops to the conflict soon after the policy’s announcement — just like President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had — calling it “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”
Hagel didn’t back away from previous statements, saying “Senator, I stand by them, because I made them.”
Maybe this will make you feel better ! She would have buried McCain and we’d all be able to laugh once again. Holland Taylor does her proud.
If Chuck Hagel is unqualified and unimpressive, then by all means, Sen. McWalnuts should block his nomination to be Secretary of Defense. But to say that he’ll drop his support for a filibuster of Hagel’s appointment when it’s politically advantageous to do so . . . well, does that not speak to the Senator’s integrity?
I know the funhouse mirrored halls of Congress can be an odd place for an outsider like me to peer into, but McCain can’t really have it both ways: If Hagel’s an incompetent menace, then McCain must block his appointment. If Hagel isn’t a menace, then why is McCain getting his knickers in such a twist about it?
Now, I’m not a well-paid teevee superstar commentator, but this seems like a simple question. But it doesn’t occur to our millionaire pundits to ask it.