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A highlight from the Kerry confirmation hearing (which was FULL OF HIGHLIGHTS for those of us who love John Kerry which I think is just me and Hillary at this point) last week:
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., expressed reservations about Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel at today’s confirmation hearing for Secretary of State nominee Sen. John Kerry, and asked Kerry to “reassure” him on Hagel; Kerry obliged, praising his former Senate colleague as a “strong, patriotic former Senator” who will make an excellent Defense Secretary.
Let this serve as a lesson for every other Republican out there. No matter how long you’ve been a Republican, or what you’ve done as a Republican, or how you’ve refrained (mostly) from pointing out that your own party is bugfuck insane and who are these people and who let them in here anyway, the minute a Democrat says something nice about you, or gives you a job such as Secretary of Something, you become HITLER TIMES INFINITY and it is time to take you down.
GOLD PLATED TRIPS FROM LOBBYISTS!
(And suddenly we hate Pentagon contracts and benefits to private companies and also conflicts of interest? Suddenly this is a problem?)
I don’t love Hagel at all, think he was kind of a crap choice and wonder why we couldn’t find a Democrat to deal with this job, but it is immensely amusing to watch Republicans throw somebody over the side just because. And I can’t believe more people don’t watch how this kind of thing happens and think twice about signing up for an outfit that treats its members like this.
A.
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Allison!
That is sort of my feeling about it. I do not really care for him, but think he is not any worse than his predecessor and has expressed some reasonably sane ideas about the US role in the world.
It turns out that there are different species of right-wing hate. Hagel is hated on account of his Apostasy From Neo-Conservatism. By contrast, Chris Christie will be hated by the Religious Right on account of his not having been With Us From the Very Start.
As an ardent anti-miltiarist Hagel is just another creep to me acting out some childish male superiority fantasy.
But I also agree completely with your last paragraph. It’s a Malthusian wonder, and might even be a kind of demonic perpetual motion machine if we are lucky, with the Republicon firing circle soon running out of targets.
Where will it end? LOL!
Agree — if Kerry only had had the sense to say that Chuck is a pile of dog-poo because he’s a Repub, he’d be a shoo-in. But that presumes that Kerry has any sense, which he disproved in 2004. He’s a natural to follow Clinton.
Anyhow what do the parties matter. Tell me again the difference between Pepsi and Coke? The big dogs in D.C. know there’s no difference.
PS: Hagel’s good. He makes sense. He’s above all this. And so much better than Uncle Leon.
If Schumer goes thumbs up, Hagels’ allowed in. As to your point about the Repubs eating their own: Republicans from the Solid South can play this up for church social potluck consumption but this Nebraska guy is hardly a boat rocker. I think his job is to secure the loose cannons, and the loose credit cards, richocheting around the DOD. Good luck, Chuck. You’ll need it and a vest to match.
Seems to be all part of the Authoritarian Follower Tribal Stalinism song and dance.
When you’re with us you can do no wrong. When we decide you’re against us (for whatever reason), you’re airbrushed out of the photo.
More than anything, other Republicans see this and think “I’d better be sure I’m I’m not a doubleplusungood crimethinker or I’ll end up an unperson”.
I share your love of Kerry. Not for his mediocre 2004 presidential run or anything he has done recently but for his 1971 appearance before the Senate representing the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His testimony there is highlighted in this segment of Lawrence O’Donnell’s “The Last Word”:
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/24/sen-kerrys-most-important-senate-appearance-happened-in-1971/
Do they hate a republican because he has agreed to work for (and with) a democratic president? (maybe)
Do they hate a republican because he has agreed to work for (and with) a black president? (I think not if he were a republican president).
Do they hate a republican because he has agreed to work for (and with) a black democratic president? (I’d have to think — I’d never dare to say it — yes).
They haven,t gotten over thier Slavery issues,Women Issues, Imigrants issues, Homophopia issues,Xenophoobia issues, and thousand other things that bogle the mind . If God is drinking, I have what he is having.
Someone has suggested that the best thing Obama could do to get the House go along with the Gang of Eight’s Immigration Deal, which is word for word copied from his May 2011 speech on the subject, is to come out against yesterday’s proposal.
Strongly, quickly — and in one-syllable words House members can digest.
I have no desire to see Hagel head Defense. Therefore, I don’t really care who opposes him or why. I am just glad someone is opposing him. My guess is that Ambassador Hormel is not too sad about the opposition, either.
Do you really think Republican Senators would support a Democratic President if he were white?
Clinton was white and they investigated the pants off him and Hillary and then impeached him.
Do you really think Republican Senators would oppose a Republican President if he were African American?
Apparently, Kerry has “evolved” since then. He’s nitpicked over whether he threw his medals or his ribbons.
And he was a founding member of the New Democrat Senate Coalition. He was also, after Lieberman’s bid for the nomination predictably and quickly got nowhere, the candidate for the 2004 nomination endorsed by the DLC.
I voted for him in 2004, not knowing about New Democrats or the DLC. I will never make that kind of mistake again. Well, not after 2008, anyway.
The DLC, New Democrats, Third Way, No Labels and all the other aliases mean one thing: Republicans who, for whatever reason, put a (D) after their respective names and who are affiliated with conservatives in other nations. As President Obama himself said, in the 1980s, he would have been a moderate Republican.
I would not limit it to the 1980s, though. Obama endorsed moderate Republican Chafee over the Democrat who was running against Chafee and supported Crist over the Democrat who ran against Crist. For a Democratic President, that is jaw-dropping. And most of his important cabinet choices have been Republicans, like Geithner, Gates, Gregg and Hagel, or former Republicans, like Panetta.
The Green Party today is where the Democratic Party was thirty or so years ago. It was the Democratic Party of my parents that attracted me. I disliked Republicans then and I dislike them even more now, whether they put a (D) after their names or not. The policies and principles were what attracted me, not the letter after the name. That is irrelevant.
Accordingly, I have begun voting Green. I will never again vote for a DLC type.