The Republican Senate minority has reached a new low, in rejecting former colleague, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, for Secretary of Defense, as a measure of spite against Hagel for backing Barack Obama in 2008, criticizing the George W. Bush “surge” in Iraq in 2007, and the exploitation of the Benghazi, Libya tragedy as a means to smack the President directly!
Hagel is perfectly qualified to be Secretary of Defense, and to have utilized the filibuster as a means to deny a vote, is reprehensible beyond description! Even Senator John Tower of Texas, a George H. W. Bush appointment as Secretary of Defense in 1989, while rejected for that position in 1989 over womanizing and liquor abuses, had the dignity of going down in an actual vote, rather than the prevention of such a vote, through the dastardly misuse of the filibuster tactic!
The Democrats and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada had a opportunity to change the filibuster rules, and had no guts or courage, and this is the disastrous result!
The Democrats need to learn to play hardball, since the Republicans fail to understand anything else! They should be ashamed at their weakness, and the Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, once again, prove how unprincipled and despicable they are in their “war” on the Obama Administration! They have no common decency, and it is clear that any attempt at bipartisanship over the next two years is out of the question!
So Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who already has had a farewell at the Pentagon, will have to stay on longer, until another attempt at overcoming the filibuster on Hagel is attempted, or Hagel withdraws, and another individual is selected to head the Defense Department.
Hello Professor,
The On Line Radio site is http://www.blogtalkradio.com/here-be-monsters
The program will start at 6:00 PM and the topic will the the State of the Union Address that the President just passed on.
Good Luck to us all. 🙂
Please clarify which date you are talking about, Engineer of Knowledge!
I should correct 6:00 PM this Sunday.
Ok, thanks, I will try to remember between now and Sunday! LOL In any case, good luck, and I imagine it would be available after online, right? Please let me know! 🙂
So the only one’s who can filibuster a nominee are the Democrats? Right? I bet you agree.Because only the Democrats are always right. I remember the infamous Dicky Durbin memo about filibustering Miguel Estrada because due to the fact that he was “Latino” was dangerous. “We cannot make the same mistake we made with Scalia and Thomas”. The disgraceful show the Democrats put on with Thomas, and the new low in morality for the Kennedy clan Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy displayed against the Honorable Judge Bork. Remember Terrence William Boyle? His federal appellate nomination from 2001 to 2007 is the longest in history not to be acted upon by the United States Senate thanks to the Democrats! Time after time any judicial nomination to the Federal Courts by a Republican President has been either filibustered or blocked by the Democrats. So finally the Republicans show some guts to filibuster for the first time and they do it with this disgraceful nominee. Because that is what Hagel is , a disgrace to this country.
Bork was an extremist, unacceptable for the Court, and we got Anthony Kennedy instead, who has been a true contribution to the Court. Thomas was a victim of his own bad behavior, and still got away with it, and has warred on all principle since he came to the Court, and is an embarrassment to the history of the Court.
Hagel is a war hero, who gave blood to his nation, and demonstrated that he had a brain, and convictions, that would not allow him to be a slave to party ideas. Being a maverick is an honorable thing, and he is not a disgrace, as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were in the Bush Administration.
Well you see that is your opinion and the lefts opinion. But apparently we, the classic liberals/conservatives, are not entitled to have an opinion and much less act on it. Bork was not an extremist, he was a good and honorable man ( something you can’t say about many Democrat politicians),a superb legal mind, much better intellectually than Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg and well I better stop before I am accused of being a racist and hating women. And Thomas is excellent. But he had the misfortune of being an independent minded “out of the plantation” African-American. In other words he isn’t a leftist, something that is unforgivable. Correct?
Thomas benefited from affirmative action, but does not want anyone else to benefit from what he did. Bork was very extremist, anti women, anti gay, anti minority, not what we need on the Court! He was a nutty libertarian who wanted to take us back to the Gilded Age, and Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, both great Senators, did what they had to do in 1987!
Many Democratic politicians are honorable, but try to name Republicans in the Senate who are—I can only think of Susan Collins and Mark Kirk–compare that to Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Ben Cardin, Sherrod Brown, Tom Harkin as just six great examples
And Breyer and the three women on the Court add balance and perspective to the Supreme Court, as Sandra Day O’Connor did. And we need an African American Justice who has not forgotten the struggle that people of his race still face every day, not a person who has forgotten where he came from, similar to Herman Cain and Tim Scott! We need another Thurgood Marshall!
You misrepresent Justice Thomas point of view, which is while going to High School in the South, and Holy Cross College, being the only black if he got a 100, he got a 100 and it was considered that he must be really good due to the obstacle he had to overcome. But when he graduated from Yale Law School , he could not get a job because it was considered that his achievements were due to “privileged treatment”. Potential employers assumed he obtained it because of affirmative action policies. According to Thomas, he was “asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated.” Furthermore he stated, “I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value.” Something similar happened to Thomas Sowell. When he received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1958 and a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1959, before affirmative action, and starting teaching, colleagues and students thought he must really be a genius considering all the difficulties he had to overcome. But when he earned his Doctorate in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1968, everyone assumed it was due to “affirmative action” and the response was not the same.
Affirmative Action did not come into play until 1972, when it was added as an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and signed into law by President Richard Nixon. So Sowell is wrong in what he said, but it is convenient to attack something that helps others of one’s race, who did not have the great opportunities offered to him and to Thomas. They try to forget that racism exists, and just because they overcome it with help, does not mean they should repudiate it for others.
So now according to Hagel in a speech he gave back in 2007 delivered at Rutgers University in New Jersey “The State Department has become adjunct to the Israeli Foreign Minister’s office…” According to Republican political consultant and Hagel supporter George Ajjan. Ajjan wrote about the March 2, 2007, speech on his website the following day, writing a description “point by point through some of the more important elements of his speech. Ajjan confirmed his 2007 account of the event, saying he was “taking notes as [Hagel] was speaking.†“If I wrote it, then that’s what happened at the time,†Ajjan stated. He added that the event, which was cosponsored by the Rutgers University Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the American Iranian Council, was closed to the press. “When [Hagel] said the State Department was becoming an adjunct of the Israeli ministry, I think that was during the Q&A,†said Ajjan. “Even in the blog, I was surprised that he said that. It was a very bold statement.†“I’d be delighted to see Hagel mount some sort of third party candidacy,†he said. “If he makes it through these confirmation hearings you really couldn’t ask for a better pedigree.â€On his Twitter feed, Ajjan expresses criticism of neoconservatives, Israel, and the war on terror that is commonplace among Hagel supporters. Ajjan said he has “been a supporter of Hagel for a long time†and admired his opposition to the Iraq war in particular.
â€Point 6“:
The State Department has become adjunct to the Israeli Foreign Minister’s office…
“Wow. A very bold statement by Hagel bound to further raise the ire of the “Jewish Lobby†(yawn…), but it does express his strong belief in a comprehensive solution to problems in the Middle East. Hagel mentioned this theme several times – comprehensive, he said, in the sense that all tools should be used to achieve American foreign policy objectives (diplomatic, political, economic, and military), but also comprehensive in the James Baker sense of addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict holistically as both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have proved too lazy and too incompetent to do.”
This is his blog http://www.ajjan.com/2007/03/hagel-in-nj-0-delegates-down-78-to-go.html Where you can read his comments on Hagel’s speech and pro-Iranian stance, all of which Ajjan supports, as well as the majority of Hagel’s supporters. So I guess Obama choose him for a reason.
This is all very interesting, but what politician does not, to some extent, change his way of looking at situations? Since the Jewish organizations did not have a problem with Hagel, and other than one statement, Hagel never demonstrated any anti Israel or anti Semitic leanings, I see no problem with Hagel being Secretary of Defense. And to say Obama is anti Israel is preposterous, an idea spread by the neocons who want war with Iran, and are willing to back Netanyahu, who is certainly right wing, and has many in Israel who oppose the way he conducts himself as Prime Minister! Obama has been a great friend for Israel, as Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres have stated many times!
Its not that neocons want war with Iran, as I said before, we are at war with Iran since they attacked us back in 1979 with taking of the embassy and hostages. Since then we have been at war, just like the cold war, though sometimes hot. It is Iran that wants to wipe out Israel, not the neocons that want to wipe out Iran. It is Iran that is not abiding by the UN resolutions,it is Iran that is violating international law, not the neocons not Bibi for that matter. And bear in mind I am not a neocon.
Actually I misrepresented Sowell’s anecdote about affirmative action. Here is the clip; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtXLzhbTz5E . Nevertheless there existed affirmative action before Nixon, it all started out with Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 mandated “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Then Johnson followed etc. In any event at Colleges and Universities this action was taken independently as a policy.
OK, Juan, I will concede that you are totally right in what you say here. So score one for you! LOL 🙂
And you are correct in what Kennedy and Johnson did, even before Nixon. You are on a roll tonight! LOL 🙂
LOL! I think the full clip is much more interesting and revealing! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1OOSKBR9O8
Thanks for this, Juan!