Hagel Pleads Ignorance: "I have a hard enough time understanding American politics, I certainly don't understand Iranian politics."

I think it's high time America finally got over age-old prejudices and installed a Dummy as SecDef.

I joked earlier that the spin had changed from "Hagel is a smart, informed, capable man" to "Hagel's too dumb to understand words that are said to him so you can't hold these things against him."

I guess it wasn't entirely a joke.

Now, the chances of Hagel being blocked remain on the low side -- Republicans are abandoning him, but Democrats can (and will) push him through, being the party of Central Planning Lockstep Cultish Behavior. Whatever Bambi wants, you know.

The only way Republicans could stop him is if they filibuster -- but will they resort to that tough measure?

Hagel has stupidly, ignorantly bumbled through most of the proceedings:

Meanwhile, as The Cable reported Wednesday, the White House is preparing to ask Russia to start a new round of nuclear-reduction negotiations and is also examining options for unilateral reductions if the Russians don't agree.

"I was a little uneasy about Hagel's answers," Sessions told The Cable about the exchange. "I thought he treated it too lightly and suggested far too readily that there's no conflict between the Global Zero report and what the Department of Defense and the president's position is on nuclear weapons."

Hagel also stumbled by saying he supported President Barack Obama's policy of containment with Iran, before Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) corrected him and said that the administration's policy was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, not to contain a nuclear Iran.

And he also claimed the Iranian government -- which staged a coup against the elected president in 2008 -- was an "elected, legitimate" government.

The fact that Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz cross-examined him effectively is overshadowing this other point: That even without tough, pointed questionings, Chuck Hagel showed himself to be generally ignorant, uninformed, and detached from any actual intellectual engagement with the issues he would (frighteningly) be called to resolve and advise the President on.

This is what we give our boys? This idiot?

Much, much more at Hot Air. Allah is pessimistic on the prospects of a filibuster, and I'm pretty sure I agree -- if you game this out, you can see that a lot of Republicans will calculate they can please the base simply by voting "No," but permitting Democrats to vote "Yes."

The key then would be to make Hagel unacceptable to swing-state Democrats.

A point made by @rbpundit (I think): The media isn't covering Lindsey Graham's cross-examination, because they have no way to spin it. With Ted Cruz, they've got an avenue of spin ("unfair," "taken out of context"). They don't have any kind of wedge with Graham's cross-examination, so their method of spinning it is their old standby, embargoing it.

As for Ted Cruz, the left is spinning that Hagel "merely" said that Israel's anti-terrorist efforts against Hezballah were the moral equivalent of Hezballah's terrorism -- and what's so bad about that?, they'd like to know.

Dum-Dum Rounds: A Democrat quipped, “It is very clear from the testimony that Sen. Hagel will not be bringing the potato salad to the next Mensa picnic.”

Quick, let's confirm him. We need the Dumb Perspective represented in government.

posted by Ace at 04:32 PM

| Access Comments