Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Nominating Hagel

20 Comments

Whose terrible idea was it, anyway? Jonathan Chait is starting the circular firing squad. I have to agree with this:

As it turned out, the Hagel nomination has been a fiasco. (Clemons’s chins-up take that Hagel “met expectations” is the most optimism any Hagel backers can muster.)

He certainly met my expectations. I fully expected him to be the hapless fool and tool he always is. And I love this understatement: “Hagel himself does not appear to be especially brilliant.”

You don’t say.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama advisor: Hagel’s conduct was “somewhere between baffling and incomprehensible.”

It’s only baffling to people so stupid that they thought he was smart.

20 thoughts on “Nominating Hagel”

    1. Forget MENSA, let’s talk Nobel Physics Laureates.

      Wasn’t Energy Secretary Dr. Chu a little bit underbriefed in his confirmation hearings back in 2009?

      By the way, I see Democrats and especially Democratic Senators “circling the wagons” on this one. Cue “Jim” to set us straight on the inevitablity of Secretary Hagel in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

    2. Oh Jim! Oh Jim, will you please serve us up some potato salad please and explain the Administration side of this for your enjoyment and edification?

      1. Give Jim a chance, Paul! He can’t perform on command, you know. He has to fire up the computer, so to such websites as “Hive OnLine” and “State-shtupper.com” and find out what the party-line script is before he can relay them back to us.

        1. As we see below, Jim’s ideology renders him clueless. Obama wants to weaken the military, defund it, but doing so through a Democrat appointee would be too obvious. To that end, Hagel is the perfect man for the job.

          1. Just a reminder: it’s Congress, not the President or his Secretary of Defense, that writes the DOD budget.

          2. You misspelled “continuing resolution.” Not that it matters –Hagel could destroy the DOD with any budget. Just a reminder.

    1. It was obvious why Bush nominated Myers — she’d served him closely and loyally. It isn’t obvious to me why Obama nominated Hagel. My best guess is that he wanted someone who was skeptical about military action, and thought that the R next to his name would make confirmation go easier. I think he will be confirmed, but I wish Obama’d nominated someone else.

        1. NO SH1T!!!!

          I’m a little frightened, it’s as if, Superman was now evil, and certain people no longer seem like themselves. I once ate some weird pizza with mushrooms that made me feel like this. Or was it, that I once ate some weird mushroom pizza, that made me feel like this.

  5. Try this scenario: Hagel goes down in flames, everyone gets to do a little bipartisan touchdown dance for spiking him in the touchdown zone… and the DefSec Obama REALLY wanted sails right through the confirmation hearings because not only did Hagel make nearly anybody else look good by comparison, but nobody in the Senate wants to oppose two nominees in a row to the same office.

    2. I don’t think Obama is trying to be that clever, but it’d be a neat trick. The Dems were dumb to oppose Harriet Myers, considering that they ended up with Alito instead.

    3. Naw, Obama’s not that smart. It’s just an obvious play to appoint someone incompetent, someone who will destroy the competency of the US military, someone without an D after his name.

  6. I think by nominating Hagel Obama also wants to divide Republicans, stick it to Israel (and be seen to be sticking it to Israel) and stick it to American Jews who were dumb enough to support him (suckas!). Otherwise why not nominate someone who doesn’t have Hagel’s baggage? It’s not as though Hagel will actually make any decisions on his own. And Obama has a pattern of using deniable gestures to insult people and groups for whom he has contempt.

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